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Title: GRAPE-4: A special-purpose computer for gravitational N-body problems

Conference ·
OSTI ID:125527

We describe GRAPE-4, a special-purpose computer for gravitational N-body simulations. In gravitational N-body simulations, almost all computing time is spent for the calculation of interaction between particles. GRAPE-4 is a specialized hardware to calculate the interaction between particles. It is used with a general-purpose host computer that performs all calculations other than the force calculation. With this architecture, it is relatively easy to realize a massively parallel system. In 1991, we developed the GRAPE-3 system with the peak speed equivalent to 14.4 Gflops. It consists of 48 custom pipelined processors. In 1992 we started the development of GRAPE-4. The GRAPE-4 system will consist of 1920 custom pipeline chips. Each chip has the speed of 600 Mflops, when operated on 30 MHz clock. A prototype system with two custom LSIs has been completed July 1994, and the full system is now under manufacturing.

OSTI ID:
125527
Report Number(s):
CONF-950212-; TRN: 95:005768-0072
Resource Relation:
Conference: 7. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) conference on parallel processing for scientific computing, San Francisco, CA (United States), 15-17 Feb 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings of the seventh SIAM conference on parallel processing for scientific computing; Bailey, D.H.; Bjorstad, P.E.; Gilbert, J.R. [eds.] [and others]; PB: 894 p.
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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