$7.0/Mflops astrophysical N-body simulation with treecode on GRAPE-5

Abstract

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.

Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1999 Gordon Bell Prize Winner (price/performance category) Performance figures are improved. Two photographs are added

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9905101

• http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9905101

• https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/sc/sc1999.html#KawaiFM99,

https://core.ac.uk/display/2331233,

http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/SC.1999.10031,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/1976460851

• http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=331598&ftid=75457&dwn=1,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/331532.331598