The competition to calculate digits of Pi was initially an informal pursuit but grew more serious over time. Our server-oriented colleagues at StorageReview have proven that storage performance can make or break a Pi run, setting their latest record at a whopping 314 million digits with a single server that ran for four months.
Calculating Pi quickly became a way to benchmark the floating-point performance of CPUs. As the calculations grew ever larger, however, the task became more complicated, as RAM, I/O architectures, and storage systems came into play. That's a point StorageReview clearly illustrated by achieving a record with a single 2U server over a four-month calculation run.
