$7.0/Mflops Astrophysical N-Body Simulation with Treecode on GRAPE-5

Abstract

As an entry for the 1999 Gordon Bell price/performance prize, we report an astrophysical N-body simulation performed with a treecode on GRAPE-5 (Gravity Pipe 5) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. The GRAPE-5 system has 32 pipeline processors specialized for the gravitational force calculation. Other operations, such as tree construction, tree traverse and time integration, are performed on a general purpose workstation. The total cost for the GRAPE-5 system is 40,900 dollars. We performed a cosmological N-body simulation with 2.1 million particles, which sustained a performance of 5.92 Gflops averaged over 8.37 hours. The price per performance obtained is 7.0 dollars per Mflops.