Google employee calculates pi to more than 31.4 trillion digits

March 14 (UPI) -- A Google employee smashed a Guinness World Record by calculating the value of pi to more than 31.4 trillion digits.

Emma Hayuka Iwao, whose accomplishment was certified by Guinness in time for Thursday's Pi Day observance, said she used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to calculate pi to 31,415,926,535,897 digits, smashing the previous record of 22,459,157,718,361 digits.

Iwao, who performed the calculation from Google's office in Osaka, Japan, said it was the first time a pi record was calculated using cloud technology.

"It was my childhood dream, a longtime dream, to break the world record for pi," Iwao told CNN.

She said she had been using computer programs to calculate pi since she was 12 years old.

Iwao was assisted by Alexander Yee, who created a program called "y-cruncher" for computing pi and similar constants. She also credited Daisuke Takahashi, her former professor and a former world record holder for pi, for helping with the accomplishment.

"We keep investing in the cloud and it gets even better over time," Iwao said. "Hopefully we can do an even bigger computation in the future."