MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performancepetascalesupercomputer system developed by theRiken research institute inJapan. It is a special purpose system built formolecular dynamics simulations, especiallyprotein structure prediction.[1]
MDGRAPE-3 consists of 201 units of 24 custom MDGRAPE-3 chips (4,824 total), plus additional dual-core IntelXeon processors (codename"Dempsey") which serve as host machines.
In June 2006 Riken announced its completion,[2] achieving thepetaFLOPS level offloating point arithmetic performance.[2] This was more than three times faster than the 2006 version of the IBMBlue Gene/L system, which then led theTOP500 list of supercomputers at 0.28 petaFLOPS. Because it's not a general-purpose machine capable of running theLINPACK benchmarks, MDGRAPE-3 does not qualify for the TOP500 list.