Astrophysical N-Body Simulations on the GRAPE-4 Special-Purpose Computer

Abstract

We report on resent astrophysical N-body simulations performed on the GRAPE-4 (GRAvity PipE 4) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. We first review the astrophysical motivation, the algorithm, the structure of the GRAPE system, and the actual performance. The GRAPE-4 system consists of 1692 pipeline processors. The peak speed of one pipeline processor is 523 Mflops and that of the total system is 884 Gflops. The performance obtained is 529 Gflops for the simulation of two massive black holes in the core of a galaxy with 700,000 stars.