GRAPE Accelerators

I’ll overview the past, present, and future of the GRAPE project, which started as the effort to design and develop specialized hardware for gravitational N-body problem. The current hardware, GRAPE-DR, has an architecture quite different from previous GRAPEs, in the sense that it is a collection of small, but programmable processors, while previous GRAPEs had hardwired pipelines. I’ll discuss pros and cons of these two approaches, comparisons with other accelerators and future directions.