Gravity Pipe

Gravity Pipe (abbreviated GRAPE) is a project which uses hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations.

Integrated with Beowulf-style commodity computers, the GRAPE system calculates the force of gravity that a given mass, such as a star, exerts on others.

The GRAPE project designed an ASIC component with mathematical logic and operations to generate the required computations.

Several versions (GRAPE-1, GRAPE-3 and GRAPE-5) use the logarithmic number system (LNS) in the pipeline to calculate the approximate force between two stars and take the antilogarithms of the x, y and z components before adding them to their corresponding total.

[3] GRAPE computes approximate solutions to the historically intractable n-body problem, which is of interest in astrophysics and celestial mechanics.

In 1999, Marseilles Observatory published a study on simulating the formation of proto-planets and plantessimals with a large planetary body.