News (2025)
Back To:
|
Pi Computed to 300 Trillion Digits: (May 16, 2025) - permalink
Oh what do we have here? A race between the hardware media outlets?
Last year, StorageReview did it twice. Once at 105 trillion digits, and again at 202 trillion. This year, almost 1 year later, it is Linus Media Group (LGM)!
Linus Media Group has been wanting this record for a while - long before StorageReview did their runs from last year. But it wasn't until July last year did Jake Tivy reach out to begin serious discussions for such an attempt - this time with even bigger hardware than StorageReview.
The next month was filled with testing, tuning, and experimenting with various hardware setups. In the process, Jake discovered yet another y-cruncher bug from the v0.8.x rewrite - a bug that StorageReview didn't hit because their hardware wasn't big enough.
(You can read more about how this botched rewrite blew up on StorageReview's 105 trillion digit record from last year.)
Once all the testing and tuning was done, the computation officially began in August and ran all the way until April this year.
Computation Statistics:
Decimal Digits: 300,000,000,000,000 Total Time: 225 days (including ~50 days of downtime)
(August 19, 2024 - April 2, 2025)
CPU: 2 x AMD Epyc 9684X (192 cores, SMT off) Memory: 3.0 TB DDR5 Storage: Swap: 48 x 15.36 TB SSDs + 24 x 30.722 TB SSDs (KIOXIA)
Digit Output: 16 x 15.36 TB KIOXIA SSDs
OS: Ubuntu 22.04 Software: y-cruncher v0.8.5.9543 Validation File: Validation File Verification: Screenshot
At first glance, 225 days for 300 trillion digits sounds very inefficient compared to 104 days for 202 trillion digits. However, there was around ~50 days of downtime from mostly external issues such as power outages and unreliable air conditioning.
So while the 225 days may not have been the best result, both the hardware and the software largely performed to expectations.
See LGM's video for more details!
End of support for HWBOT Integration: (April 4, 2025) - permalink
As some of you may have noticed, y-cruncher v0.8.6 no longer includes the HWBOT submitter application to submit benchmarks to HWBOT. The reason for this is that HWBOT has banned all versions of y-cruncher past v0.8.5 from certain categories due the frequent performance improvements.
Despite strong opposition from both myself as well as the author of BenchMate, HWBOT is sticking to this decision.
After considering these things:
- The HWBOT submitter was always a messy side-project (written in Java) that I've hated to maintain.
- I would need to implement category/version filters in order to abide by HWBOT's new rules.
- My time has largely shifted away from y-cruncher to focus on work and other (unrelated) side-projects.
I have decided that it is best to simply discontinue the HWBOT submitter. So going forward, there will be no further support for HWBOT integration from y-cruncher itself. You will have to rely on BenchMate to submit to HWBOT.
y-cruncher's goals have never aligned well with HWBOT. y-cruncher has always been in the pursuit of maximum performance while HWBOT has always wanted maximum consistency. While HWBOT has managed the performance inconsistencies over the years, it finally reached the breaking point with v0.8.6.
What this means going forward is that any world records found on HWBOT should be taken with a grain of salt as they will be using outdated versions of y-cruncher that are likely slower than the latest and greatest.
New Fastest Formula for Zeta(5): (January 25, 2025) - permalink
As new fastest formula for Zeta(5) has been found by Zhi-Wei Sun which Jorge Zuniga has turned into custom formula file for use in y-cruncher!
The new formula is nearly twice as fast as the previous fastest (Kruse 2019). You can read more about this here.
Zeta(5) is now about as fast to compute as Gamma(1/5) and the Euler-Mascheroni Constant. (which are still slow, but Zeta(5) was previously in a category of its own)
Version 0.8.6 Released: (January 9, 2025) - permalink
Version 0.8.6 has been released. I was originally holding for the (longshot) hope that AMD would announce a dual X3D AM5 chip so I could build a tuning profile for it.
But as AMD has clarified at CES, it was never going to happen...
I wish Intel the best in getting themselves back up to speed. Competition is good for consumers.