  We present a novel approach to accelerate astrophysical hydrodynamical
simulations. In astrophysical many-body simulations, GRAPE (GRAvity piPE)
system has been widely used by many researchers. However, in the GRAPE systems,
its function is completely fixed because specially developed LSI is used as a
computing engine. Instead of using such LSI, we are developing a special
purpose computing system using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips as
the computing engine. Together with our developed programming system, we have
implemented computing pipelines for the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)
method on our PROGRAPE-3 system. The SPH pipelines running on PROGRAPE-3 system
have the peak speed of 85 GFLOPS and in a realistic setup, the SPH calculation
using one PROGRAPE-3 board is 5-10 times faster than the calculation on the
host computer. Our results clearly shows for the first time that we can
accelerate the speed of the SPH simulations of a simple astrophysical phenomena
using considerable computing power offered by the hardware.
