Hardware accelerator for molecular dynamics: MDGRAPE-2
We developed MDGRAPE-2, a hardware accelerator that calculates forces at high speed in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. MDGRAPE-2 is connected to a PC or a workstation as an extension board. The sustained performance of one MDGRAPE-2 board is 15 Gflops, roughly equivalent to the peak performance of the fastest supercomputer processing element. One board is able to calculate all forces between 10000 particles in 0.28s (i.e. 310000 time steps per day). If 16 boards are connected to one computer and operated in parallel, this calculation speed becomes ?10 times faster. In addition to MD, MDGRAPE-2 can be applied to gravitational N-body simulations, the vortex method and smoothed particle hydrodynamics in computational fluid dynamics.
molecular dynamics special purpose computer