Blog: Supercomputer Cracks 'Impossible' Calculation

Supercomputer Cracks 'Impossible' Calculation
The Australian (Australia) (04/19/11) Jennifer Foreshew

Researchers at Newcastle University, IBM Australia, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently used the BlueGene/P supercomputer to calculate the billionth decimal digit of pi, a calculation that was thought to be unachievable. The project would have taken about 1,500 years on one central-processing unit, but it took just a few months using BlueGene/P. "What this is driving is a new attack on various classical questions about how random or how complex various bits of math are, and how best to program these things on really large environments with tens or hundreds of thousands of processors," says Newcastle professor Jon Borwein. "We may be able to put some of these algorithms together, mixing this idea of algorithmic randomness with this fairly new area called quantum randomness, using natural processes to build random things." The researchers are developing a prototype system that could lead to further advances in algorithmic randomness and quantum randomness.

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