Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2016
We have developed a massively parallel special-purpose computer system for N-body simulations, GRAPE-4 (GRAvity-PipE 4). The GRAPE-4 system is designed for high-accuracy simulations of dense stellar systems. The GRAPE-4 calculates gravitational forces, their derivatives in time and potential energies. It has a hardware for prediction of positions and velocities, which is used for the individual timestep scheme. Using multi-chip module technology, we integrated 1692 chips of 640 megaflops performance. The peak speed of GRAPE-4 is 1.08 teraflops.