MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performance petascale 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,[2] achieving the PetaFLOPS level of floating point arithmetic performance.[2] This was more than three times faster than the 2006 version of the IBM Blue Gene/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.