The university yesterday claimed the record, asserting that it beat previous attempts by 12.8 trillion digits, and did it 3.5 times faster than previous attempts at calculating the irrational ratio.

The university used a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc 7542 processors to carry out the feat. AMD said that the CPU cores spend most of their time at 2.9GHz, can burst to 3.4GHz, have 128MB L3 cache and happily run 64 threads apiece.

A server with 1TB of RAM was also employed, with Ubuntu Linux 20.04 installed on a pair of solid-state disks of unspecified size.

A JBOD housed 38 7200RPM hard disks, each with 16TB capacity to store the values swapped from RAM. Hard disks were chosen over SSDs because SSD performance degrades over time and the university's designers feared their intensive calculations could cause problems. In all, the uni said 510TB of disk space was used.

The last ten digits stored on those disks are 7817924264 and they are now the last known digits of Pi.