A 1.349 Tflops simulation of black holes in a galactic center on GRAPE-6

Abstract

As an entry for the 2000 Gordon Bell performance prize, we report the performance achieved on a prototype GRAPE-6 system. GRAPE-6 is a special-purpose computer for as-trophysical N-body calculations. The present configuration has 96 custom pipeline processors, each containing six pipeline processors for the calculation of gravitational interactions between particles. Its theoretical peak performance is 2.889 Tflops. The complete GRAPE-6 system will consist of 3072 pipeline chips and will achieve a peak speed of 100 Tflops. The actual performance obtained on the present 96-chip system was 1.349 Tflops, for a simulation of massive black holes embedded in the core of a galaxy with 786,432 stars. For a short benchmark run with 1,400,000 particles, the average speed was 1.640 Tflops.