Pavel Kroupa
Pavel Kroupa: Grape6/GPU
The Stellar Populations and Dynamics Research Group is building-up a
cluster of special-purpose supercomputers for the solution of the
equations of motion of the many-body gravitational force
problem. These so-called GRPEP6 machines (build in Japan) are being
used for theoretical research by the stellar-dynamics group of the Sternwarte to
study problems ranging from the birth of star clusters to interacting
galaxies.
As of Augurst 12th 2004 we have one MicroGRAPE installed on a 3.2 GHz
Pentium P4 with 250 GB HD, and it achieves a peak speed of about 110
GFLOP/sec, about 150 times faster than a 3 GHz stand-alone
processor. The acquisition of additional machines is planned to make
the AIfA one of the major locations for research with and training on
such machines.
Currently we have two MicroGRAPEs and one GRAPE6-Pro/8, and two
additional MicroGRAPEs are being purchased.
Since 2008, the group is installing GPU-based
computers. Speed-ups by factors of ten or more have been achieved for
computations using Aarseth's Nbody6 code (Holger Baumgardt) and
Superbox++ (Manuel Metz).
Some useful information on our GRAPE6 and GPU project can be found at
here.