What We Learned From Special Purpose Computers

Abstract

The never ending urge for higher performance computing facilities at low price has let physicists built their own “home made” special purpose computers to allow computer experiments of larger size than was possible before. This approach has triggered many people world wide for a variety of models in physics and chemistry. For molecular dynamics simulations a range of special purpose computers have been designed, built and used as a low cost alternative for supercomputers. This paper describes three of these designs, that fruitfully have been used over the last ten years.