gravitySimulator is a novel supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

 that incorporates special-purpose GRAPE

Gravity Pipe

Gravity Pipe, otherwise known as GRAPE, is a project which uses hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations. Integrated with Beowulf-style commodity computers, the GRAPE system calculates the force of gravity that a given mass, such as a star, exerts on others...

 hardware to solve the gravitational N-body problem

N-body problem

The n-body problem is the problem of predicting the motion of a group of celestial objects that interact with each other gravitationally. Solving this problem has been motivated by the need to understand the motion of the Sun, planets and the visible stars...

. It is housed in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation

Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation

The Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation is a research center at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It comprises faculty, postdoctoral research associates and students working in the areas of computational general relativity, gravitational waves, relativistic astrophysics, and...

 (CCRG) at the Rochester Institute of Technology

Rochester Institute of Technology

The Rochester Institute of Technology is a private university, located within the town of Henrietta in metropolitan Rochester, New York, United States...

. It became operational in 2005.

The computer consists of 32 nodes, each of which contains a GRAPE-6A board ("mini-GRAPE") in a PCI

Peripheral Component Interconnect

Conventional PCI is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer...

 slot. The GRAPE boards use pipelines to compute pairwise forces between particles at a speed of 130 Gflops.
The on-board memory of the 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 4Tflops.

gravitySimulator is used to study the dynamical evolution of galaxies and galactic nuclei.

External links

• phiGRAPE, an N-body code optimized for GRAPE clusters
• How to build and use special purpose PC clusters in stellar dynamics