I know the value of Pi, the irrational number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, as far as 3.14159 and after that I’m clueless. Recently, though, French software engineer, Fabrice Bellard, calculated the value of Pi out o 2.7 trillion numbers… with a souped-up but otherwise ordinary home PC running Red Hat’s Fedora Linux.
Bellard, best known for being the founding developer of FFMpeg, the highly respected audio/video program for converting music and movies from one format to another, took on Pi not because he was “especially interested in the digits of Pi, ” but because he was interested “in the various algorithms involved to do arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge.” You can say that again.
To pull this off, Bellard used a PC running an 2.93 GHz 64-bit Intel Core i7 CPU with just over 6GBs of RAM. The only thing really extraordinary about his record-setting PC was that he used 7.5 TB (TeraBytes) of disk storage. This consisted of five Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard disks. These are high-performance drives with 3 Gbps (Gigabit per second) SATA (Serial ATA) interfaces.