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Comment by aaaaaaaaaaab | Hacker News Reader

Meh, throwing raw power at the problem is not that impressive.

Bellard's [1] 2009 record was much more impressive, because he used a clever formula to break the existing record with a mere (albeit beefy) desktop computer: https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/

The record he broke with his desktop PC was made using a supercomputer cluster.

[1] If somebody is not familiar with him, he is also the original author of QEMU, ffmpeg and the Tiny C Compiler.

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And JSLinux - full PC emulation in your browser (this never ceases to amaze me no matter how often I play with it):

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

There are quite a bit of other very impressive projects under their belt as well. QEMU and FFMPEG to name some I use daily. What a legend.

According to the FAQ, the bottleneck on this process was hard disk speed, would running the algorithm today be noticeably faster on a NVME SSD? Could it be modified to run on a computer with a sufficient amount of RAM, perhaps in batches?

Have there been other improvements in single-core clock speeds, multi-core performance, or any other CPU hardware components to make running this noticeably faster on high-end consumer hardware?

Wow, I had no idea that the same guy is behind both QEMU and FFMPEG! That's really impressive.

I struggle to see any complexity into google approach - unlike bellard's one that is an amazing feat.

They basically pulled more machine to compute more. nothing really impressive. pretty much any dev with that computing power could have done it

I think that's the point they are trying to make; that doing this with GCP is super boring and easy.

Exactly. It's a matter of K8s configuration, which a devops intern can do in a few weeks probably.

Compare this with the Chudnovsky brothers, who built their pi calculating "supercomputer" from commodity parts in their NY apartment, back in 1992: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-...

(and being mathematicians, they also discovered novel formulas for speeding up their calculation)

It's fairly impressive.

Keeping a single server online for 111 days straight at full CPU and RAM usage over 96 cores and 1.4TB of RAM is a good start. The fact that such a machine exists is already mind-blowing. Then add 25 more nodes running iSCSI, all out 24/7 for 111 days. Hell, just mounting 240TB on a single system is a good stunt, go ahead and try it and let me know it's not "complex".

And your last point kind of IS the point of their marketing: any dev could do it if they have the skill, and they'll rent you the hardware.

While those are interesting systems administration tasks, I believe the point is that the previous record was held by someone who used smarter maths (than the previous previous record) and vastly fewer computing resources.

I don't think it's about the PI tbh, more like a pretty stunt to me

They did it so I could say,

There are three kinds of mathematicians, those that can count and those that can not.

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