14 DAY TRIAL // If you asked a mathematician what the most fascinating number was, they would probably say Pi and then launch into a lecture of how it is fascinating because there is nothing repetitive about the decimals.
Calculating Pi is something that supercomputers have been doing ever since their inception.
As it happens, however, the record for calculating the places to the right of the decimal point is now held by a group of normal PCs, though an admittedly strange one.
Santa Clara University researcher Ed Karrels used three PCs with four NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 cards, one with a pair of 680 cards, and 25 with one GTX 570 each (at the Santa Clara University Design Center).
He was able to break the record for computing digits by reaching eight quadrillion places to the right of the decimal point.
The calculations took 35 days to complete (December 19 to January 22) and beat the previous record, established by a Yahoo team with 1,000 CPU-only computers (23 days to two quadrillion places).