Thread by @IanCutress

I pulled up some numbers for Google Cloud Platform server and storage pricing to see how much it would cost a layperson to do the 31.4 trillion Pi calc.

I didn't look into network costs, or extra time for configs/restart - just raw computation time. I get a price of $173,335.76

This is using standard pricing, not pre-emptible pricing, which is a lot cheaper.

Here's the URL for GCP costs:

cloud.google.com/compute/pricing

Here's some costs on hardware, at just over $200k. This is raw list pricing - Google and other cloud providers obviously buy this stuff at super cheap pricing. This is ballparking, based on the loose specifications cloud providers give for instances and configurations.

#PiDay

Google did live migrations of the storage and compute nodes which it detected a hint of degradation in any component. This means they had full-node redundancy. So they could have used double this, easily, over the length of the computation.

#PiDay

Google says in its blog that if you want to spin up an instance to host the results file, it will cost you $40/day for the cloned disk.

cloud.google.com/blog/products/…

I'm little bit wrong here. The validation file lists 90x16 GB DIMMs in the compute node. This means that the 96 vCPU compute node is actually an 8 socket system with 12 thread CPUs? Perhaps they're using customized large L3 cache models as y-c can be L3 bottlenecked