Gravity Pipe

Gravity Pipe (abbreviated GRAPE) is a project which uses hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations. Integrated with Beowulf-style commodity computers, the GRAPE system calculates the force of gravity that a given mass, such as a star, exerts on others. The project resides at University of Tokyo.

The GRAPE hardware acceleration component "pipes" the force computation to the general-purpose computer serving as a node in a parallelized cluster as the innermost loop of the gravitational model.

The GRAPE project designed an ASIC component with mathematical logic and operations to generate the required computations. This means the latter generations of GRAPE supercomputers, despite not providing a Turing complete computational processing power, are powerful for heavily mathematical super-computing usages. The MD-GRAPE 3 supercomputer was also used in protein folding simulations.

Its shortened name, GRAPE, was chosen as an intentional reference to the Apple Inc. line of computers.