Pi record smashed as team finds two-quadrillionth digit - BBC

Cloud computing to the rescue!  While a cloud computer can be made from any ole computer the current push is to use MiniITX systems for lower power consumption and space savings.  (read: Atom processors) multiply the power of the Atom by 1000x and you have some serious number crunching.

Nicholas Sze, of tech firm Yahoo, said that when pi is expressed in binary, the two quadrillionth digit is 0.

Mr Sze used Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record.

It took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers - on a standard PC, the calculation would have taken 500 years.

500 years on a standard PC ?!?, that is a long time.  Then again an EVGA SR-2 equipped with 2x HyperThreaded 6 core processors running at 6Ghz each isn't a standard PC?  Sadly you would still run out of LN2 long before the calcuation had completed.

Related Web URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11313194