Lesson plan
GravitySimulator
gravitySimulator is a novel supercomputer that incorporates special-purpose GRAPE hardware to solve the gravitational n-body problem. It is housed in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It became operational in 2005. The computer consists of 32 nodes, each of which contains a GRAPE-6A board ("mini-GRAPE") in a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slot. The GRAPE boards use pipelines to compute pairwise forces between particles at a speed of 130 Gflops. The on-board memory of each GRAPE board can hold data for 128,000 particles, and by combining 32 of them in a cluster, a total of four million particles can be integrated, at sustained speeds of 4Tflops. gravitySimulator is used to study the dynamical evolution of galaxies and galactic nuclei.
Article summary
gravitySimulator is a novel supercomputer that incorporates special-purpose GRAPE hardware to solve the gravitational n-body problem. It is housed in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It became operational in 2005. The computer consists of 32 nodes, each of which contains a GRAPE-6A board ("mini-GRAPE") in a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slot. The GRAPE boards use pipelines to compute pairwise forces between particles at a speed of 130 Gflops. The on-board memory of each GRAPE board can hold data for 128,000 particles, and by combining 32 of them in a cluster, a total of four million particles can be integrated, at sustained speeds of 4Tflops. gravitySimulator is used to study the dynamical evolution of galaxies and galactic nuclei.
Key claims
No claims recorded.
Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.