gravitySimulator is a novel

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

that incorporates special-purpose

GRAPE A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus ''Vitis''. Grapes are a non- climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters. The cultivation of grapes began perhaps 8,000 years ago, ...

hardware to solve the gravitational ''n''-body problem. It is housed in the

Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation The Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) is a research center of the College of Science (COS) and a Research Center of Excellence at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) dedicated to research at the frontiers of numerical ...

(CCRG) at the

Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private university, private research university in the town of Henrietta, New York, Henrietta in the Rochester, New York, metropolitan area. The university offers undergraduate and graduate degree ...

. It became operational in 2005. The computer consists of 32 nodes, each of which contains a GRAPE-6A board ("mini-GRAPE") in a

Peripheral Component Interconnect Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format th ...

(PCI) slot. The GRAPE boards use pipelines to compute pairwise forces between particles at a speed of 130 Gflops. The on-board memory of each GRAPE board can hold data for 128,000 particles, and by combining 32 of them in a cluster, a total of four million particles can be integrated, at sustained speeds of 4 Tflops. gravitySimulator is used to study the dynamical evolution of

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

and

galactic nuclei An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that has a much-higher-than-normal luminosity over at least some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with characteristics indicating that the luminosity is not pr ...

.H. Perets ''et al.'' (2009)
Dynamical evolution of the young stars in the Galactic center
arXiv:0903.2912

References

External links

phiGRAPE
an ''N''-body code optimized for GRAPE clusters
How to build and use special purpose PC clusters in stellar dynamics
Astrophysics Rochester Institute of Technology Supercomputers {{super-compu-stub