Definition
GRAPE (GRAvity PipE) is the name of a series of special-purpose computers designed for the numerical simulation of gravitational many-body systems. Most of GRAPE machines consist of hardwired pipeline processors to calculate the gravitational interaction between particles and programmable computers to handle all other works. GRAPE-DR (Greatly Reduced Array of Processor Elements with Data Reduction) replaced the hardwired pipeline by simple SIMD programmable processors.
Discussion
Introduction
The improvement in the speed of computers has been a factor of 100 in every decade, for the last 60 years. In these 60 years, however, the computer architecture has become more and more complex. Pipelined architecture were introduced in 1960s, and vector architectures became the mainstream in 1970s. In 1980s, a number of parallel architectures appeared, but in the 1990s and 2000s, distributed memory parallel computers built from microprocessors have taken over.
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Makino, J. (2011). GRAPE. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_286
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_286
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