On May 26, 2004, the Japanese Ministry of Education officially announced funding of several large research projects, including the new GRAPE-DR Project. This project will lead to the building of the next GRAPE, with a speed exceeding that of 1 Petaflops. The new GRAPE project is funded for a five-year period, starting in July 2004.

The new GRAPE will allow double-precision calculations of gravitational N-body simulations, and will be the successor of the previous GRAPE-2 (1991), GRAPE-4 (1995), GRAPE-6 (2001). However, the architecture will be a complete departure from that of the previous GRAPEs. Instead of many parallel pipelines, each chip will contain several hundred processors. Unlike pipelines with a predescribed data flow, these processors will be fully programmable. They will be designed with the N-body application in mind, and therefore moderately optimized for the application. However, in a stark departure from previous GRAPEs, the new GRAPE can function as a general-purpose computer. The best comparison with previous architectures would be the Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2, built by Thinking Machines in the nineteen-eighties; with the difference that one new GRAPE chip will carry an amount of logic comparable to that contained in a full CM-1 or CM-2.

Link to the official GRAPE-DR site(Sorry, currently only in Japanese)

Link to astro-ph/0509278, a description of GRAPE-DR architecture.