Shigeru Kondo of Iida, Nagano Prefecture, worked with software designed by Northwestern University grad student Alexander Yee, and followed up their 2010 feat of reckoning pi to 5 trillion digits.
The result was achieved earlier this month after 371 days of computation and numerous hard drive failures.
The work was not affected by the March earthquake and tsunami, or by subsequent power shortages, because Nagano is in central Japan and on a different power grid than the disaster zones.
The desktop runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with 3.33 GHz Intel Xeon X5680 cores. It required 48 terabytes of hard drive space, with an additional 7.6TB to store the compressed output; as an uncompressed text file, it would be 16.6TB.
The temperature of the computer room shot up to nearly 104 Fahrenheit, or 40 Celsius.
"We could dry the laundry immediately, but we had to pay 30,000 yen ($390) a month for electricity," Kyodo News quoted Kondo's wife, Yukiko, as saying.
What's next for pi? Any takers for 20 trillion digits?
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