RIKEN MDGRAPE-3

For the astronomical supercomputer also known as GRAPE, see Gravity Pipe.

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 (4,824 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 benchmarks, MDGRAPE-3 does not qualify for the TOP500 list.

See also

• Supercomputing in Japan
• MDGRAPE-4