The supercomputer calculated a sixty-trillion binary digit of Pi in a square

The IBM Blue Gene / P supercomputer calculated a sixty-trillion binary number of Pi in a square in just a few months - at a speed of one quadrillion calculations per second. Running on thousands of individual processors, the computational monster did something that would take a single processor 1500 years.

Last year, cloud computing found a two-quadrillion figure of Pi itself, but you can rightly ask why all this is important.

“The interesting thing about these calculations is that just a few years ago it was widely believed that such mathematical objects were forever beyond the reach of human reasoning or machine computing,” explains one of the researchers, “And again we see the complete futility of setting limits on human ingenuity and technology. "
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The full study is available here (PDF).