GRAPE project

We overview our GRAvity PipE (GRAPE) project to develop special-purpose 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. Our newest machine, GRAPE-6, achieved the peak speed of 32 Tflops, and sustained performance of 11.55 Tflops, for the total budget of about 4 million USD. o discuss relative advantages of special-purpose and general-purpose computers and the future of high-performance computing for science and technology.