Paper Info
Title
GRAPE-4: a one-Tflops special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body problem
Abstract
We describe the GRAPE-4 (Gravity Pipe 4) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. In N-body simulations, most of the computing time is spent to calculate the force between particles, since the number of interactions is proportional to the square of the number of particles. For many problems the accuracy of fast algorithms such as the particle-mesh scheme is not sufficient and we have to use the straightforward direct summation.In order to accelerate the force calculation, we have developed a series of hardwares, the GRAPE (Gravity Pipe) systems. The basic idea of our GRAPE systems is to develop a hardware specialized for the force calculation. The rest of the calculation is performed on the general-purpose computer connected to GRAPE.The GRAPE-4 system is our newest hardware, scheduled to be completed in early 1995. Planned peak speed is 1.15 Tflops. This speed is achieved by running 1920 pipeline LSIs, each provides 600 Mflops, in parallel. A prototype system has been completed July 1994, and the full system is now under manufacturing.
Year
DOI
Venue
1994
10.1109/SUPERC.1994.344306
SC
Keywords
Field
DocType
N-body problems,astronomy computing,mainframes,special purpose computers,1.15 TFLOPS,GRAPE 4,Gravity Pipe 4 system,astrophysical N-body problem,astrophysical N-body simulations,computing time,force calculation,general-purpose computer,particle-mesh scheme,particles,peak speed,pipeline LSI,prototype system,special-purpose computer,supercomputers
n-body problem,Host interface,FLOPS,Computer science,Parallel computing,Gravity Pipe,Fibre Channel
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-9535
0-8186-6605-6
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.62
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Junichiro Makino114734.17
Makoto Taiji215025.32
Toshikazu Ebisuzaki33012.85
Daiichiro Sugimoto475.89