Commodity Hardware Crunching Pi

Commodity hardware has just shown up the big guys in Pi crunching.

Two fellas from Japan have reached the 5 trillionth digit of Pi using on commodity hardware and a custom Pi crunching software. Here are the specs of the box:

• Processor 2 x Intel Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz – (12 physical cores, 24 hyperthreaded)
• Memory 96GB DDR3 @ 1066MHz – (12 x 8 GB – 6 Channel) – Samsung (M393B1K70BH1)
• Motherboard Asus Z8PE-D12
• Hard Drives
  • 1 TB SATA II (Boot drive) – Hitachi (HDS721010CLA332)
  • 3 x 2 TB SATA II (Store Pi Output) – Seagate (ST32000542AS)
  • 16 x 2 TB SATA II (Computation) – Seagate (ST32000641AS)
• Raid Controller 2 x LSI MegaRaid SAS 9260-8i
• Operating System Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64

It took the guys 90 days to tackle the 5 trillionth digit, which is a 2. I have to wonder what kind of increase we’d see if we simply changed the OS to Linux or BSD based instead of a clunky Windows Server install?

You can find more pictures and details of the event at http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-5t/details.html