RIKEN MDGRAPE-3

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The RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer
The RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer
For the astronomical supercomputer also known as GRAPE, see Gravity Pipe.

MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performance supercomputer system developed by the RIKEN research institute in Japan. It is a special purpose system built for molecular dynamics simulations, especially protein structure prediction.[1]

MDGRAPE-3 consists of 201 units of 24 custom MDGRAPE-3 chips (4808 total), plus additional Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors (codename "Dempsey") which serve as host machines.

In June 2006 RIKEN announced its completion[citation needed], achieving the PetaFLOPS level of floating point arithmetic performance[citation needed]. This was more than three times faster than the 2006 version of the IBM BlueGene/L system, which then led the TOP500 list of supercomputers at 0.28 PetaFLOPS. Because it's not a general-purpose machine capable of running the LINPACK benchmark, MDGRAPE-3 does not qualify for the TOP500 list.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Carey, Bjorn (2006), "Overachievers We Love - Faster", Popular Science 269 (6): 24
  • RIKEN press release, "Completion of a one-petaflops computer system for simulation of molecular dynamics" [1]
  • Makoto Taiji, "MDGRAPE-3 chip: A 165-Gflops application-specific LSI for Molecular Dynamics Simulations", 16th IEEE Hot Chips Symposium, August 2004. [2]

[edit] External links