Study of the evolution of planetary system, star clusters and galaxies using a special-purpose computer

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We developed a new special-purpose computer, GRAPE-8, designed to be used with Particle-Particle Particle Tree method, which is a method to handle both collisionless and collisional systems efficiently. The processor chip of GRAPE-8 achieved the performance per watt of 40 Gflops/W, which is more than 30 times better than those of the latest general-purpose microprocessors. The performance per watt of the total system is around 6Gflops/W, nearly an order of magnitude better than that of usual PC clusters. Thus, we succeeded to reduce the cost of electricity for large-scale astrophysical simulations.