A Google employee broke the world record for calculating pi

(Business Insider) -  Google employee Emma Haruka Iwao used Google's cloud computing service to break the world record for calculating pi, an infinite number vital to engineering.

Most people will be familiar with the first few digits of pi from geometry class (3.14...). It's the number you get when you divide a circle's circumference by its diameter.

Iwao a cloud developer advocate who has been working at Google for over three years successfully calculated pi to 31 trillion digits, beating the previous record by 9 trillion. Google announced her accomplishment on March 14 , which just so happens to be pi day .

Doing so required huge amounts of data processing. Using the program y-cruncher on a Google Compute Engine cluster, she ate through 170 terabytes of data over about four months.