<p>To calculate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to an undetermined number of digits, Shigeru Kondo, a 55-year-old resident of Iida and a company employee in Nagano Prefecture, assembled a computer with 32 terabytes of hard-drive capacity and used an application made by Alexander Yee, a 22-year-old student at a US graduate school.<br />After Kondo repeated tests via e-mail, he began the computation on May 4, and the work lasted 90 days and about seven hours until it was completed on August 3, including verifications, following difficulties including a power outage. He plans to apply for the Guinness Book of Records.<br /><br />The mountainous task affected the daily lives of Kondo's family. His wife, Yukiko, 53, said they had to pay 20,000 yen (USD 235) a month for electricity.The work was also threatened when their 29-year-old daughter used a dryer and threw a circuit breaker. Kondo managed to rescue the operation using a 10-minute backup power supply.<br /><br />As the temperature of the computer room soared to near 40 degrees Celsius, Kondo avoided a hardware meltdown by removing casings and exposing computer parts to cooling fans.<br /><br />Kondo has been engaged in computing the value of pi since calculating the value to 1,000 digits as a fourth-year technology college student. While working as a systems engineer for a food company, he repeatedly assembled computers using commercially available circuit boards and memory.<br /><br />"This is for sheer self-satisfaction," said Kondo, who spent 1.5 million yen (USD 17,625) on the computer used in the latest calculation.<br /><br />But "I used only 60 per cent of the computer's total capabilities," he said. "I want to try to compute the value to 10 trillion digits, possibly next spring."</p>
<p>To calculate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to an undetermined number of digits, Shigeru Kondo, a 55-year-old resident of Iida and a company employee in Nagano Prefecture, assembled a computer with 32 terabytes of hard-drive capacity and used an application made by Alexander Yee, a 22-year-old student at a US graduate school.<br />After Kondo repeated tests via e-mail, he began the computation on May 4, and the work lasted 90 days and about seven hours until it was completed on August 3, including verifications, following difficulties including a power outage. He plans to apply for the Guinness Book of Records.<br /><br />The mountainous task affected the daily lives of Kondo's family. His wife, Yukiko, 53, said they had to pay 20,000 yen (USD 235) a month for electricity.The work was also threatened when their 29-year-old daughter used a dryer and threw a circuit breaker. Kondo managed to rescue the operation using a 10-minute backup power supply.<br /><br />As the temperature of the computer room soared to near 40 degrees Celsius, Kondo avoided a hardware meltdown by removing casings and exposing computer parts to cooling fans.<br /><br />Kondo has been engaged in computing the value of pi since calculating the value to 1,000 digits as a fourth-year technology college student. While working as a systems engineer for a food company, he repeatedly assembled computers using commercially available circuit boards and memory.<br /><br />"This is for sheer self-satisfaction," said Kondo, who spent 1.5 million yen (USD 17,625) on the computer used in the latest calculation.<br /><br />But "I used only 60 per cent of the computer's total capabilities," he said. "I want to try to compute the value to 10 trillion digits, possibly next spring."</p>
