Solidigm Helps Break World Record Pi Calculation

An array of Solidigm D5-P5316 QLC solid-state drives (SSDs) were recently put to the test and helped successfully break the speed record for calculating pi to 100 trillion digits. With Solidigm’s drives, the StorageReview team was able to calculate pi nearly three-times as fast as previous record-holder Google.

Brian Beeler, owner and editor-in-chief of StorageReview, led the team that ran calculations in their Cincinnati lab using Solidigm D5-P5316 QLC SSDs with consultation from the Solidigm Product team. “Since pi is a well-defined and well-known mathematical number, computational performance results and output can be easily compared across different systems, making it an ideal benchmark for system performance comparisons,” said Beeler. “Solidigm’s high-performance SSDs helped achieve this infinite number in record-breaking time and to a record-breaking degree, firmly solidifying their status as a leading provider of data storage solutions—a David amongst more well-known industry Goliaths.”

Thanks to the SSDs’ density, performance and cost profile, the P5316 makes it possible to run analytics on massive data sets only possible previously with a massive investment either in the cloud or on premise/onsite. Beeler and the StorageReview Team recorded 23 PBs written into the QLC storage, with read activity for new checkpoints meeting or exceeding that figure. The D5-P5316 QLC SSDs from Solidigm kept up without being over-saturated and delivered more than sufficient read access.

“With ample endurance projected to last ~10 years under the intensity of this workload and read performance equivalent to class-leading TLC SSDs, imagine what this drive can do in mainstream data center applications. The possibilities are as endless as pi itself,” said Greg Matson, VP, Solidigm’s Data Center Storage Group. “We’re thrilled that Solidigm’s SSDs could power StorageReview’s record-breaking attempt to calculate pi. Their efforts prove the true capabilities of Solidigm’s storage drives, opening a world of possibilities for real-world application.”

Pi Calculation Overview

• Program: y-cruncher by Alexander Yee
• Algorithm: Chudnovsky (1988)
• Compute node: Quanta server powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC™
• Total elapsed time: 59 days, 10 hours, 46 minutes, and 49.55 seconds
• Total storage size: 530.1 TB available, 514.5 TB peak usage
• Total I/O: 40.2 PB Read, 35.4 PB Written, 75.6 PB Total

Solidigm’s SSDs offer an ideal blend of density, performance, and affordability, making it a market leader in the data storage industry. The quad-level cell (QLC) D5-P5316 drives deliver near-equivalent read performance as TLC SSDs on massive, affordable capacities and support more than sufficient lifetime writes (petabytes written) to stand up to the demands of the workload.

“QLC works perfectly for this workload. It’s bursty and write-heavy, sending almost 30TB of writes to each drive, every day. That would be over 10PBW per year if we kept up this pace. These QLC SSDs have no problem at all keeping up with the computation, while also providing tremendous density in a single server. Further, over our nearly 60-day test, we saw only a negligible consumption of overall SSD endurance,” said Beeler.

Although a computation of this scale does not have a practical application (10 places is the extent used by the most precise pi measurements in science and academia and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory only uses 15 digits for its calculations for spacecraft navigation), this exercise demonstrates how well equipped Solidigm QLC SSDs are to stand up to today’s high-volume workloads used in business-critical applications such as advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data pipelines.

“We are extremely thrilled with the work the teams at Solidigm and StorageReview accomplished to calculate pi to 100 trillion digits in record breaking time using 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president of Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions, AMD. “This is yet another strong proof point of our customers leveraging EPYC processors for truly computationally intense workloads.”

Solidigm offers best-in-class storage solutions to both store data, and make it faster, easier, and more affordable to access, analyze and put into action. Learn more about Solidigm and our variety of product offerings here.

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StorageReview.com is a world-leading independent storage authority, providing in-depth news coverage, detailed reviews, SMB/SME consulting, and lab services on storage arrays, hard drives, SSDs, and the related hardware and software that makes these storage solutions work. Our emphasis is on storage solutions for the midmarket and enterprise, with limited coverage of core brands that offer client storage solutions.