Current Status of GRAPE Project

I'll summarize the current status of GRAPE project. GRAPE-6, completed in 2002, has been used by a number of people, for a wide variety of problems such as planet formation, star cluster dynamics, galactic nuclei, and cosmology. In 2004, we started the development of the next-generation machine, GRAPE-DR. GRAPE-DR has a architecture radically different from that of previous GRAPEs. It does not have hardwired pipeline for gravitational force calculation but a large number of small and simple programmable processors. This change made it possible to apply GRAPE-DR to a wide range of problems to which GRAPE was not efficient, and at the same time it helps us to explore new algorithms for N-body simulations. The GRAPE-DR chip was completed in 2006, and second prototype board was completed in May 2007. We hope to have full production-level board commercially available by the end of year 2007. A single board will offer the theoretical peak speed of 2 Tflops, about 20 times as that of a single PCI card version of GRAPE-6.