Special-purpose supercomputers are high-performance computing devices with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom VLSI chips, allowing higher price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. They are used for applications such as astrophysics computation and brute-force codebreaking. Historically a new special-purpose supercomputer has occasionally been faster than the world's fastest general-purpose supercomputer, by some measure. For example, GRAPE-6 was faster than the Earth Simulator in 2002 for a particular special set of problems.
Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:
- Belle, Deep Blue, and Hydra, for playing chess
- Reconfigurable computing machines or parts of machines
- GRAPE, for astrophysics and molecular dynamics
- Deep Crack, for breaking the DES cipher
- MDGRAPE-3, for protein structure computation
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