Japanese Number Crunchers Calculate Pi to 10 Trillion Digits

A pair of Pi lovers named Alexander J. Yee and Shigeru Kondo have calculated the mathematical constant out to 10 trillion digits. It took over a year -- 371 days -- on Kondo's desktop, not a supercomputer, to accomplish the feat, and it wasn't easy getting there. Kondo battled multiple hard drive failures, and each time an HDD would go belly up, he would have to roll back the computation to a previous checkpoint. Kondo says this added up to 180 days of lost time.
His desktop is comprised of two Intel Xeon X5680 processors running at 3.33GHz, 96GB of DDR3-1066 memory, Asus Z8PE-D12 motherboard, three LSI MegaRaid SAS 9260-8i RAID controllers, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64 installe... »read more

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