Related papers: Direct Simulation of Dense Stellar Systems with GR…
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…
Recently, special-purpose computers have surpassed general-purpose computers in the speed with which large-scale stellar dynamics simulations can be performed. Speeds up to a Teraflops are now available, for simulations in a variety of…
We present the outline of a research project aimed at designing and constructing a hybrid computing system that can be easily scaled up to petaflops speeds. As a first step, we envision building a prototype which will consist of three main…
The GRAPE-4, the world's fastest computer in 1995-1997, has produced some major scientific results, through a wide diversity of large-scale simulations in astrophysics. Applications have ranged from planetary formation, through the…
In this paper, we describe the design and performance of GRAPE-6A, a special-purpose computer for gravitational many-body simulations. It was designed to be used with a PC cluster, in which each node has one GRAPE-6A. Such configuration is…
Direct-summation N-body algorithms compute the gravitational interaction between stars in an exact way and have a computational complexity of O(N^2). Performance can be greatly enhanced via the use of special-purpose accelerator boards like…
Simulations of dusty plasmas were performed using GRAPE-6, a special-purpose computer designed for gravitational N-body problems. The collective behaviour of dust particles, which are injected into the plasma, was studied by means of…
We present Sapporo, a library for performing high-precision gravitational N-body simulations on NVIDIA Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). Our library mimics the GRAPE-6 library, and N-body codes currently running on GRAPE-6 can switch to…
We report on resent N-body simulations of galaxy formation performed on the GRAPE-4 (GRAvity PipE) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. We review the astrophysical motivation, the algorithm, the actual…
The simulation of rich star clusters presents challenging problems of several kinds, including the design of suitable hardware and software, and numerous theoretical problems in stellar dynamics and stellar physics. Great progress has been…
Galactic nuclei and globular clusters act as laboratories in which nature experiments with normal stars, neutron stars and black holes, through collisions and through the formation of bound states, in the form of binaries. The main…
Challenging stellar dynamical problems, such as the study of gravothermal oscillations in star clusters, have in the past initiated the very successful building of GRAPE special purpose computers. It is discussed, that present day tasks…
A combined N--body/SPH code is presented which benefits from the high speed of the special purpose hardware GRAPE (GRAvity PipE). Besides gravitational forces, GRAPE also returns the list of neighbours and can, therefore, be used to speed…
The "gravitational million-body problem," to model the dynamical evolution of a self-gravitating, collisional N-body system with ~10^6 particles over many relaxation times, remains a major challenge in computational astrophysics.…
We have developed a special-purpose computer for gravitational many-body simulations, GRAPE-5. GRAPE-5 is the successor of GRAPE-3. Both consist of eight custom pipeline chips (G5 chip and GRAPE chip). The difference between GRAPE-5 and…
We discuss the performance of direct summation codes used in the simulation of astrophysical stellar systems on highly distributed architectures. These codes compute the gravitational interaction among stars in an exact way and have an…
We present numerical simulations of galaxy formation, one of the most challenging problems in computational astrophysics. The key point in such simulations is the efficient solution of the N--body problem. If the gas of a galaxy is treated…
We present Particle-Particle-Particle-Mesh (PPPM) and Tree Particle-Mesh (TreePM) implementations on GRAPE-5 and GRAPE-6A systems, special-purpose hardware accelerators for gravitational many-body simulations. In our PPPM and TreePM…
We present performance measurements of direct gravitational N -body simulation on the grid, with and without specialized (GRAPE-6) hardware. Our inter-continental virtual organization consists of three sites, one in Tokyo, one in…
Astrophysical Challenges which demand the solution of the one million (or more) gravitating body problem are briefly discussed for the fields of cosmology, galactic nuclei and globular star clusters. Results from the classical three-body…