Today,
David Shaw of D. E. Shaw Research delivered a
Distinguished Lecture in Computational Science here at Harvard (this is a new seminar series that
Ros Reid and I cooked up to bring in a few high-profile speakers each semester). Of course, prior to forming D. E. Shaw Research, David founded
D. E. Shaw and Co., a hedge fund which was one of the most successful
quantitative analysis shops. Since 2001, David has been doing research full time -- D. E. Shaw Research develops both algorithms and customized machine architectures for molecular dynamic simulations, such as protein folding and macromolecule interactions. The result is the
Anton supercomputer, a heavily customized machine with 512 specialized computing cores specifically designed for particle interaction simulations. It was a great talk and was very well attended -- I'll post the video once it's available.
David presented the algorithms and architecture behind the Anton machine. The goal is to run molecular dynamic sim…