“On Thursday, Google announced that MIT math professor and computational number theorist Andrew V. Sutherland had set a record for the largest Google Compute Engine (GCE) job. Sutherland ran the massive mathematics workload on 220,000 GCE cores using preemptible virtual machine instances. This is the largest known high-performance computing cluster to run in the public cloud, according to Google’s Alex Barrett and Michael Basilyan. Sutherland used Google’s cloud to explore generalizations of the Sato-Tate Conjecture and the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer to curves of higher genus, write Barrett and Basilyan on the Google Cloud Platform blog. “In his latest run, he explored 1017 hyperelliptic curves of genus 3 in an effort to find curves whose L-functions can be easily computed, and which have potentially interesting Sato-Tate distributions. This yielded about 70,000 curves of interest, each of which will eventually have its own entry in the L-functions and Modular Forms Database (LMFDB),” they explain. Sutherland compared the quest to find suitable genus 3 curves to “searching for a needle in a fifteen-dimensional haystack.” It’s highly compute-intensive research that can require evaluating a 50 million term polynomial in 15 variables. Before moving to the public cloud platform, Sutherland conducted his research locally on a 64-core machine but runs would take months. Using MIT clusters was another option, but there were sometimes access and software limitations. With Compute Engine, Sutherland can create a cluster with his preferred operating system, libraries and applications, the Google blog authors note.”