Hardware accelerator for molecular dynamics: MDGRAPE-2 Original Research Article

We developed MDGRAPE-2, a hardware accelerator that calculates forces at high speed in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. MDGRAPE-2 is connected to a PC or a workstation as an extension board. The sustained performance of one MDGRAPE-2 board is 15 Gflops, roughly equivalent to the peak performance of the fastest supercomputer processing element. One board is able to calculate all forces between 10 000 particles in 0.28 s (i.e. 310000 time steps per day). If 16 boards are connected to one computer and operated in parallel, this calculation speed becomes ∼10 times faster. In addition to MD, MDGRAPE-2 can be applied to gravitational N-body simulations, the vortex method and smoothed particle hydrodynamics in computational fluid dynamics.