gravitySimulator is a novel
supercomputer that incorporates special-purpose
GRAPE
A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry (botany), berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus ''Vitis''. Grapes are a non-Climacteric (botany), climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters.
The cultivation of ...
hardware to solve the gravitational
''n''-body problem. It is housed in the
Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (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 ...
(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.
[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
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