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Abstract : |
As an entry for the 2000 Gordon Bell performance prize, we report the performance achieved on a prototype GRAPE-6 system. GRAPE-6 is a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body calculations. The present configuration has 96 custom pipeline processors, each containing six pipeline processors for the calculation of gravitational interactions between particles. Its theoretical peak performance is 2.889 Tfiops. The complete GRAPE-6 system will consist of 3072 pipeline chips and will achieve a peak speed of 100 Tfiops. The actual performance obtained on the present 96-chip system was 1.39 Tfiops, for a simulation of massive black holes embedded in the core of a galaxy with 786,32 stars. For a short benchmark run with 1,00,000 particles, the average speed was 1.60 Tfiops., |
