How lucky is Nicholas Sze, a researcher who works for Yahoo? The dude just calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of Pi (and then some), and will never again have to worry about coming up with a pick-up line to land the ladies. Well, that's assuming the girl he's hitting on has a serious hankering for math.

In case you're keeping track, not only did Sze break the previous record, he utterly destroyed it by more than doubling the calculation. Using Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology, it took Sze 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers to set the new record. That much computing power is equivalent to over 500 years of a single computer's capability.

Sze's calculation made use of a method called MapReduce. What this Google-developed method entails is dividing up big problems into smaller sub-problems and then combining the answer to solve intractable mathematical equations.

"Interestingly, by some algebraic manipulations, [our] formula can compute Pi with some bits skipped; in other words, it allows computing specific bits of Pi," Sze explains.

Rock on.

IBM now holds the world record for the highest SPECjbb 2005 benchmark ever achieved by a two-socket, x86 server, and Big Blue wants the whole world to know about it. You'll have to excuse us if we help them out a little.

A pretty remarkable feat, IBM's System  x3690 X5 server clocked 1,015,260 business operations per second on the popular benchmark, which is used to evaluate performance of servers running typical Java applications. The benchmark record also gives IBM more ammunition to market its x3690 X5, which according to Big Blue is the only scalable two-socket server designed to support critical enterprise applications and external memory expansion.

See here for the full rundown.