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GRAPE Computers

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.

TABLE-1 Low-Precision machines

Machine Year Peak Notes
GRAPE-1 1989 240Mflops Concept Syste,
GRAPE-3 1991 15 Gflops Custom LSI
GRAPE-5 1998/9 ~ 1Tflops


TABLE-2 High-Precision machines

Machine Year Peak Notes
GRAPE-2 1990 40Mflops IEEE single/double
HARP-1 1993 180 Mflops Force and its time derivative
GRAPE-4 1995 1Tflops Single-chip pipeline
GRAPE-6 2002 64Tflops 6 pipelines in one chip
GRAPE-DR 2008 2 Pflops New architecture

For more details, check the following links and papers:

Photo gallery of GRAPEs

Back to GRAPE Project


Last Update: May 28, 2004