Related papers: Astrophysics on the GRAPE Family of Special Purpos…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper we describe the current status of the GRAPE-6 project to develop a special-purpose computer with a peak speed exceeding 100 Tflops for the simulation of astrophysical N-body problems. One of the main targets of the GRAPE-6…
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…
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…
The application of high end computing to astrophysical problems, mainly in the galactic environment, is under development since many years at the Dep. of Physics of Sapienza Univ. of Roma. The main scientific topic is the physics of self…
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…
We present a novel approach to accelerate astrophysical hydrodynamical simulations. In astrophysical many-body simulations, GRAPE (GRAvity piPE) system has been widely used by many researchers. However, in the GRAPE systems, its function is…
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…
An adaptation of the Particle-Particle/Particle-Mesh (P3M) code to the special purpose hardware GRAPE is presented. The short range force is calculated by a four chip GRAPE-3A board, while the rest of the calculation is performed on a Sun…
I review recent progress in numerically simulating the formation and evolution of galaxies in hierarchically clustering universes. Special emphasis is given to results based on high-resolution gas dynamical simulations using the N-body…
In astrophysics numerical star cluster simulations and hydrodynamical methods like SPH require computational performance in the petaflop range. The GRAPE family of ASIC-based accelerators improves the cost-performance ratio compared to…
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…
Astronomers have come to rely on the increasing performance of computers to reduce, analyze, simulate and visualize their data. In this environment, faster computation can mean more science outcomes or the opening up of new parameter spaces…
The modern study of the dynamics of stellar systems requires the use of high-performance computers. Indeed, an accurate modelization of the structure and evolution of self-gravitating systems like planetary systems, open clusters, globular…
The subjects and key questions faced by computational astrophysics using N-body simulations are discussed in the fields of globular star cluster dynamics, galactic nuclei and cosmological structure formation. After a comparison of the…
In recent years, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has emerged as a low-cost alternative for high performance computing, enabling impressive speed-ups for a range of scientific computing applications. Early adopters in astronomy are…
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…
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…