  Challenging stellar dynamical problems, such as the study of gravothermal
oscillations in star clusters, have in the past initiated the very successful
building of GRAPE special purpose computers. It is discussed, that present day
tasks such as the formation and evolution of galactic nuclei with one or more
massive black holes and the coupled stellar and gas dynamical processes in the
formation of nuclei and star clusters, demand a new kind of hybrid
architecture, using both GRAPE and a reconfigurable logics board called RACE.
For such a system we have developed first implementations and floating point
performance studies in the case of the SPH algorithm (smoothed particle
hydrodynamics), which will be of great advantage for SPH modelling and also for
direct $N$-body simulations using the more efficient Ahmad-Cohen neighbour
schemes.

Astrophysics