Do-it-yourself computational astronomy
Hardwares, algorithms, softwares, and sciencesJunichiro Makino
Abstract:
We overview our GRAPE (GRAvity PipE) and GRAPE-DR project to develop dedicated
computers for astrophysical N-body simulations. The basic idea of GRAPE
is to attach a custom-build computer dedicated to the calculation of gravitational
interaction between particles to a general-purpose programmable computer. By this
hybrid architecture, we can achieve both a wide range of applications and very high
peak performance. GRAPE-6, completed in 2002,
achieved the peak speed of 64 Tflops. The next machine, GRAPE-DR, will have the peak
speed of 2 Pflops and will be completed in 2008.
We discuss the physics of stellar systems, evolution of general-purpose high-performance
computers, our GRAPE and GRAPE-DR projects and issues of numerical algorithms.