Products : GRAPE-7 : Acceleration Board for Many-Body Simulations

GRAPE-7 Model800

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.

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.

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).

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.

version 2.2 (2009/4/4)
version 2.1 (2008/3/17)
version 2.0 (2007/5/25)
version 1.0 (2007/2/13)
version 0.4 (2007/2/08)
version 0.3 (2007/1/17)

Initial Technical support for 3 months.

460,000 JPY

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.

	Model 600E	Model 300E	Model 100E

Processor chip	Interaction pipelines (such as gravity) implemented in Altera's FPGA (reconfigurable device) Cyclone II.
Processor chip	Six Altera Cyclone II (EP2C70)	Three Altera Cyclone II (EP2C70)	One Altera Cyclone II (EP2C70)
Host interface	x4 PCI Express (with G7XE adapter)
Interchip data transfer	800MB/s LVDS ring (two rings)	800MB/s LVDS ring (one ring)	N/A
Attached interaction pipeline	Gravity interaction (GRAPE-5 equivalent)
Attached interaction pipeline	120pipe 100MHz (456Gflops peak)	60pipe 100MHz (228Gflops peak)	20pipe 133MHz (101Gflops peak)
Power supply	PCIe card edge, HDD 12V connector		PCIe card edge
Power consumption	20W	12W	3W
International price	357,000 JPY	262,500 JPY	124,950 JPY

	Model 600	Model 300	Model 100

Processor chip	Interaction pipelines (such as gravity) implemented in Altera's FPGA (reconfigurable device) Cyclone II.
Processor chip	Six Altera EP2C70	Three Altera EP2C70	One Altera EP2C70
Host interface	100MHz 64bit PCI-X	100MHz 64bit PCI-X	133/100MHz 64bit PCI-X
Interchip data transfer	800MB/s LVDS ring (two rings)	800MB/s LVDS ring (one ring)	N/A
Attached interaction pipeline	Gravity interaction(GRAPE-5 equivalent)
Attached interaction pipeline	120pipe 100MHz (456Gflops peak)	60pipe 100MHz (228Gflops peak)	20pipe 133MHz (101Gflops peak)
Power supply	PCI-X card edge, HDD 12V connector		PCI-X card edge
Power consumption	20W	12W	3W
International price	325,500 JPY	231,000 JPY	93,450 JPY

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