GRAPE
SUMMARY
The GRAPE (short for GRAvity PipE) family of special-purpose hardware was
designed and built by a group of astrophysicists at the University of Tokyo.
Like a graphics accelerator speeding up graphics calculations on a workstation,
without changing the software running on that workstation, the GRAPE acts
as a Newtonian force accelerator, in the form of an attached piece of hardware.
In a large-scale gravitational N-body calculation, where N is the number
of particles, almost all instructions of the corresponding computer program
are thus performed on a standard workstation, while only the gravitational
force calculations, in innermost loop, are replaced by a function call
to the special-purpose hardware.
Connected to a front
end workstation, a single GRAPE-6 board can run at a speed of up to 1
Teraflops. The Full GRAPE-6 configuration in Tokyo will run at 100
Teraflops.
HISTORY
back in 1987....89....91....
PEOPLE
Jun Makino,
Piet Hut,
many others (to be filled in)
LINKS
Page last modified:
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Please direct comments, criticisms, corrections
and contributions to Steve McMillan:
steve (at) physics.drexel.edu.