In 1997, we started the GRAPE-6 project. It's a five-year project funded by JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), and the planned total budget is about 500 M JYE.
The GRAPE-6 is essentially a scaled-up
version of GRAPE-4[7], with the peak speed
exceeding 100 Tflops. It will consist of around 3000 pipeline
chips, each with the peak speed of 40 Gflops. In comparison, GRAPE-4
consists of 1700 pipeline chips, each with 600 Mflops. The increase of
a factor of 100 in speed is achieved by integrating six pipelines into
one chip (GRAPE-4 chip has one pipeline which needs three cycles to
calculate the force from one particle) and using 3--4 times higher
clock frequency. The advance of the device technology (from 
to 
) made these improvements possible. Figure
5 shows the first sample of the processor chip
delivered in early 1999. The six pipeline units are visible.
Figure 5: The GRAPE-6 processor chip.
Figures 6 and 7 shows the processor board with 16 processor chips and the prototype four-board system. This four-board system has the theoretical peak speed of 2.1 Tflops, and has achieved the sustained speed of 1.1 Tflops for the simulation of 1 million-body system.
Figure 6: The processor board of the GRAPE-6 with 16 processor
chips. Two processor chips are mounted on modules, on which four
memory chips are also mounted. One board houses eight modules.
Figure 7: The prototype system with four processor board.
GRAPE-6 will be completed by the year 2001. We plan to make small version of GRAPE-6 (peak speed of around one teraflops) commercially available by that time. We've found that the commercial availability of small machines is essential to maximize the scientific outcome from GRAPE hardwares.