GRAPE-DR ranks 1st on Little Green500

It has been a while since I last heard from the GRAPE-DR project. This week it was finally announced that a recently installed GRAPE-DR system was holding the top spot on the Little Green 500 list, boosting a remarkable 815MFLOPS per Watt. GRAPE-DR is a generalization of the GRAPE systems professor Jun Makino had been working on for astrophysical simulations. A paper on GRAPE-DR had been presented at Supercomputing'07. I still remember reading it back then. The new system has been designed in collaboration with professor Kei Hiraki from 東大 (Tokyo U.) whom I had the pleasure to meet at ISCA'0'4 in Munich. Glad to see the system has been finally built. Although the current system is by no way the 2PFLOPS machine that the authors intended to build by 2008, 23 TFOPS for a 64-node machine is still a quite remarkable feat. Every node has one accelerator board that holds 4 GRAPE-DR chips, each doing 200GFLOPS double precision in just 50 Watt. More information can be found here.