High-performance special-purpose computers in science

The next decade will be an exciting time for computational physicists. After 50 years of being forced to use standardized commercial equipment, they will finally be able to adapt their computing tools to their own needs. The first step in this breakthrough is the widespread availability of programmable chips that allow virtually every computational scientist to design his or her own special-purpose computer. The paper considers the Grape project which is one example in which computational physicists developed special-purpose computers successfully.