GRAPE-6: Massively-Parallel Special-Purpose Computer for Astrophysical Particle Simulations

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we describe the architecture and performance of the GRAPE-6 system, a massively-parallel special-purpose computer for astrophysical $N$-body simulations. GRAPE-6 is the successor of GRAPE-4, which was completed in 1995 and achieved the theoretical peak speed of 1.08 Tflops. As was the case with GRAPE-4, the primary application of GRAPE-6 is simulations of collisional systems, though it can also be used for collisionless systems. The main differences between GRAPE-4 and GRAPE-6 are (a) the processor chip of GRAPE-6 integrates 6 force-calculation pipelines, compared to one pipeline of GRAPE-4 (which needed 3 clock cycles to calculate one interaction), (b) the clock speed is increased from 32 to 90 MHz, and (C) the total number of processor chips is increased from 1728 to 2048. These improvements resulted in a peak speed of 64 Tflops. We also discuss the design of the successor of GRAPE-6.