Anton 3
David E. Shaw, P. J. Adams, Asaph Azaria, Joseph A. Bank, Brannon Batson, Alistair Bell, Michael Bergdorf, Jhanvi Bhatt, J. Adam Butts, Timothy Correia, Robert M. Dirks, Ron O. Dror, Michael P. Eastwood, Bruce Edwards, Amos Even, P. Feldmann, Michael Fenn, Christopher H. Fenton, Anthony Forte, Joseph Gagliardo, Gennette Gill, Maria Gorlatova, Brian Greskamp, J.P. Grossman, Justin Gullingsrud, Anissa Harper, William Hasenplaugh, Mark Heily, Benjamin Colin Heshmat, Jeremy Hunt, Douglas J. Ierardi, Lev Iserovich, Bryan L. Jackson, Nick Johnson, Mollie M. Kirk, John L. Klepeis, Jeffrey S. Kuskin, Kenneth MacKenzie, Roy J. Mader, Richard McGowen, Adam McLaughlin, Mark A. Moraes, Mohamed H. Nasr, Lawrence J. Nociolo, Lief O'Donnell, Andrew Parker, Jon L. Peticolas, Goran Pocina, Cristian Predescu, Terry Quan, John K. Salmon, Carl Schwink, Keun Sup Shim, Naseer Siddique, Jochen Spengler, Tamas Szalay, Raymond Tabladillo, Reinhard Tartler, Andrew G. Taube, Michael Theobald, Brian Towles, William Vick, Stanley C. Wang, M. Wazlowski, Madeleine J. Weingarten, John Williams, Kevin Yuh
Abstract
Anton 3 is the newest member in a family of supercomputers specially designed for atomic-level simulation of molecules relevant to biology (e.g., DNA, proteins, and drug molecules). Anton 3 achieves order-of-magnitude improvements in time-to-solution over its predecessor, Anton 2 (the current state of the art), and is over 100-fold faster than any other currently available supercomputer, thereby enabling broad new avenues of research on critical questions in biology and drug discovery. This speedup means that a 512-node Anton 3 simulates a million atoms at over 100 microseconds per day. Furthermore, Anton 3 attains this performance while consuming an order of magnitude less energy per simulated microsecond than any other machine. Like its predecessors, Anton 3 was designed from the ground up around a new custom chip to best exploit the capabilities offered by new technologies. We present here the main architectural and algorithmic developments that were necessary to achieve such significant advances.