Thaindian News

September 17, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): Mathematicians have always been intrigued by the mysterious number ‘pi’ and have tried to deduce the actual value. In a recent development, a researcher named Nicholas Sze of the technology firm ‘Yahoo’ has found out the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of the mathematical constant pi. The researcher claims that the digit when expressed in binary comes down to 0.

Mr. Sze used the famous Hadoop cloud computing technology to double the previously held record of determining the value of pi. The computation was so heavy that it took 23 days on 100 computers of Yahoo. If the calculations had been done on a single computer with substantial computing power, it would take a whopping 500 years!

Although Yahoo is going to get all the credit for this remarkable discovery, at the heart of the calculation lies a procedure that was originally developed by Google. Google’s very own technology MapReduce was used to divide this infinitely large problem into thousand smaller problems that were solved by 1,000 separate computers connected through a cloud computing network.

At Yahoo a cluster of 1,000 computers executed the complex algorithm to solve an equation that calculated the specific digits of pi. Slicing pi has been the favorite pastime of mathematicians for a long time now and this remarkable discovery simply ups the ante. Mr. Sze claimed in a recent interview that the calculation was a good test for the Hadoop hardware and approach. This new calculation method can be beneficial in the fields of physics, cryptography and data mining. The Hadoop technology can also be used for benchmarking and testing.