The GRACE Project
Astrophysical Computer Simulations using Programmable Hardware-
Gravitational Waves visualized
from Black Hole Merger in GRACE Cluster titan (April 2008, avi-File 95 MB)
-
April 2008:
The new FPGA Board MPRACE-2 Hardware Testing Phase begins with the goal
to use the new faster FPGA hardware for simulations in the GRACE project.
- Rhein-Neckar TV:
Foundation
of ZITI at Univ. of Heidelberg
campus TV May 15, 2008
- The rise of Graphical Processing Units as Special Purpose Computing Hardware, see the Astro GPU Workshop ; we are currently working on the evaluation of these new possibilities relative to our FPGA cards. See more details on this work .
GRACE is an interdisciplinary project of theoretical astrophysics and computer engineering to use reconfigurable hardware (FPGA = field programmable gate array) for astrophysical particle simulations. Teams of Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Zentrum für Astronomie Univ. Heidelberg (ARI-ZAH) , Lehrstuhl V, Central Institute for Computer Engineering (ZITI), Univ. Heidelberg, Location Mannheim (ZITI) and Lehrstuhl Computational Astrophysics (CAST) at the Universitätssternwarte München (USM) collaborate to use Programmable Hardware (FPGA) for gravitational and non-gravitational force computations (e.g. for smoothed particle hydrodynamics SPH) in particle based large scale astrophysical computer simulations. The dynamics of galactic nuclei with black holes, of merging galaxies, of star formation is modelled using this new computer architecture. Our main international collaborators are David Merritt and Hans-Peter Bischof with the GRAPEcluster at RIT as well as Naohito Nakasato, nakasato@riken.jp and Tsuyoshi Hamada, thamada@riken.jp , and the PROGRAPE/PGR project , RIKEN Japan
The GRACE cluster ''titan''
at the
ARI
ZAH (Heidelberg, Germany)
was assembled and delivered by
sysgen GmbH
using MPRACE Boards
of UMA
with Xilinx Virtex-2 
FPGA hardware
(see the Mannheim FPGA Webpage );
micro-GRAPE6
hardware, produced by
Hamamatsu Metrix Co. Japan
Last updated: July 2008. Please send comments to: spurzem@ari.uni-heidelberg.de.
