Products : GRAPE-7 : Acceleration Board for Many-Body Simulations
Key Features
- The high-end model of GRAPE-7 add-in card with four Altera
CycloneIII EP3C120 FPGA (reconfigurable) devices. Pipelines for
calculation of interactions, such as gravity, can be implemented into
the devices, so that the card works as an arithmetic-computation
accelerator.
- Adopts 16-lane PCI Express as an interface to the host computer.
- A pipeline for gravitational-force calculation (equivalent to
GRAPE-5) is bundled. Its user library has an API compatible with that
of conventional GRAPEs including GRAPE-5 and previous models of
GRAPE-7 (Model100/300/600). Users of these hardwares can seamlessly
migrate their own application codes.
- Users can design their own pipelines with a pipeline-designing
utility PGPG21.
Technical Specifications
| Processor chip |
Altera CycloneIII (EP3C120) x 4 |
| Host interface |
16-lane PCI Express |
| Attached interaction pipeline |
Gravity interaction (GRAPE-5 equivalent) 128pipe 170MHz (827 Gflops peak) |
| Power supply |
PCIe card edge, 6-pin 12V connector |
| Power consumption |
30W |
| Miscellaneous |
- FPGA devices can be reconfigured from the host computer.
- Operational clock frequency of the pipelines can be adjusted
from the host computer, without resynthesis of the logic design.
- The host computer communicates with the FPGAs via a
transparent PCIe switch and PCIe/PCI-X bridges. The device driver
and the data-transfer library handles these FPGAs as four
independent PCI-X devices.
- Via the user library, a user can handle the four FPGAs as
four independent devices, or as a single device.
|
Softwares, Data, and Documents
Relevant softwares, data, and documents are packed into GRAPE-7 Software Package
version 2.2.1 (2009/4/24, latest). The package includes:
- A GRAPE-5 equivalent gravity interaction pipeline (128pipe 170MHz, 827 Gflops peak)
- A user library (with source code).
- A device driver for Linux (with source code).
Documents included in the software package:
- 00readme
- GRAPE-7 Installation
Guide for installation and set up. Included in the software
package.
- G5PIPE User's
Guide: for GRAPE-5 compatible backend logic. Basic usage, sample
codes, and library reference. Included in the software package.
- G5nbPIPE User's
Guide: for GRAPE-5 compatible backend logic with neighbor-particle
search function. Basic usage, sample codes, and library
reference. Included in the software package.
Old versions of the software package:
Miscellaneous
Initial Technical support for 3 months.
International Price
460,000 JPY
Usage Examples
- As a hardware-accelerator for gravitational many-body simulations:
- A GRAPE-5 equivalent pipeline for gravitational-force calculation
is bundled. Its user library has an API compatible with that of
conventional GRAPEs including GRAPE-5 and previous models of GRAPE-7
(Model100/300/600). Users of these hardwares can seamlessly migrate
their own application codes.
- As a general-purpose, programmable hardware-accelerator for
arithmetic computation:
- Users can design their own pipelines with a pipeline-designing
utility PGPG21.
- As an evaluation board for Altera CycloneIII EP3C120 and 16-lane PCI Express:
- A pipeline-designing utility PGPG2
generates VHDL sources for all logics including those of pipelines and
an interface to the host (except for the PCI-X core). All softwares
including the device driver and the user library are provided with source codes.
Using these sources, users can evaluate CycloneIII EP3C120 and 16-lane PCI Express.
Related Information
- 1: In order to generate a bit-stream data (the
final product of a pipeline design to be written to FPGA devices),
PLDA's PCI-X IP
core is required. For GRAPE-7 users who do not have the core, we
offer a free-of-charge service to generate the bit-stream data.
- Contact: info@kfcr.jp
