MRI: Acquisition of two special-purpose computers for simulation of the galactic center environment

Rochester Institute Of Tech, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project is for the acquisition of a pair of advanced, special-purpose computers to be used in N-body simulations of the dynamics and evolution of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The computers, called GRAPE-6Pros, contain massively parallel pipelines that can compute inverse-square gravitational forces between as many as one million particles at a speed of approximately 1 trillion floating point operations per second. Combined with sophisticated N-body code that was recently developed at RIT, which efficiently integrates stellar orbits near the supermassive black hole, the GRAPE computers will enable researchers and students at RIT to carry out the most sophisticated simulations to date of the nuclear star cluster at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.