Junichiro Makino
, Toshiyuki Fukushige and Masaki Koga
Department of Astronomy, School of Science,
University of Tokyo,
Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Email:
makino@astron.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Department of
General System Studies,
College of Arts and Sciences,
University of Tokyo,
Tokyo 153-8902, Japan
As an entry for the 2000 Gordon Bell performance prize, we report the performance achieved on a prototype GRAPE-6 system. GRAPE-6 is a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body calculations. The present configuration has 96 custom pipeline processors, each containing six pipeline processors for the calculation of gravitational interactions between particles. Its theoretical peak performance is 2.889 Tflops. The complete GRAPE-6 system will consist of 3072 pipeline chips and will achieve a peak speed of 100 Tflops. The actual performance obtained on the present 96-chip system was 1.349 Tflops, for a simulation of massive black holes embedded in the core of a galaxy with 786,432 stars. For a short benchmark run with 1,400,000 particles, the average speed was 1.640 Tflops.