Title:
Anton, an Application-Specific Supercomputer for Molecular Dynamics Computations

Abstract:
Many important outstanding questions in the fields of biology, chemistry, and medicine could in principle be answered through the atomic-level simulation of biologically significant molecules. This talk describes Anton, a massively parallel, supercomputer-class machine that is specialized to Molecular Dynamics simulations. Anton is specialized to an extreme degree, incorporating new algorithms, specialized non-programmable computation units, specialized programmable cores, and a specialized communication network. When combined, these specializations give an overall performance several orders of magnitude beyond that achieved by commodity solutions and also significantly faster than what can be achieved by general-purpose supercomputers.

Bio:
Cliff Young works for D. E. Shaw Research on projects involving special-purpose, high-performance computers for computational biochemistry. Before his current position, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He received A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Harvard University in 1989, 1995, and 1998, respectively.