8 ms·
Anton (Computer)
- dzonga 7y agowho else thought about son of Anton, from Silicon Valley show ?
- beefalo 7y agoYeah, I expected this to be a joke
- vermilingua 7y agoI would say it's likely that the SV Anton was named after this.
- dunkelheit 7y agoI’ve always assumed it was a reference to Anton LaVey (seemed appropriate for Gilfoyle to name his server after the founder of the church of satan). It would be interesting to know which theory is correct.
- vermilingua 7y agoGood point, and while SV does have a lot of obscure references, this one may be a bit too obscure. Happy coincidence perhaps.
- bavent 7y agoGilfoyle refers to himself as a LaVeyan satanist early on in the show.
- vermilingua 7y agoYeah, I was referring to the supercomputer as obscure.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mechagodzilla 7y agoTo make this more timely, DE Shaw Research has been posting COVID-19 related simulations done on their Antons: http://www.deshawresearch.com/resources_sarscov2.html http://www.deshawresearch.com/resources_sarscov2.html
- kylek 7y agoThere is an Anton 2 (no wikipedia article unfortunately)- https://insidehpc.com/2016/02/anton-2-supercomputer-at-psc-will-increase-speed-and-size-of-molecular-simulations/ https://insidehpc.com/2016/02/anton-2-supercomputer-at-psc-w...
- zelphirkalt 7y agoThere is also "Son of Anton".
- mdonahoe 7y agoGilfoyle, is that you?
- ackbar03 7y agoI have a lot of respect for david shaw. He quit managing his hedge fund day to day because he said something along the lines of finance make me stupid or something and went back to doing something useful. If only more of our elites realized this (and cared to do something useful with themselves)
- downerending 7y agoMe as well. It does seem that the whole point of being a billionaire is to do whatever you want. I can't imagine why so many seem to stick to managing their creations, which after a while can't be much fun.
- pm90 7y agoMost billionaires got their wealth through inheritance. All they know is to manage the wealth creation agent that was handed down to them. Most of the self made ones too have spent a large chunk of their lives perfecting the wealth generation agent which made them rich. It would be like asking a pro NBA player to also take a shot at being a pro NFL player. It’s not what they trained for; they would need to learn a new skill, a new industry and they will most likely fail anyways. Only a minority of such billionaires actually end up doing different things; Elon Musk comes to mind. Most are victims of their previous successes.
- colanderman 7y agoTo fully connect the dots: after spending many years doing something really well, it can be humbling and depressing to try to extract purpose or identity from something you're comparatively terrible at. Impactful competence (or at least, the belief thereof) is a tough drug to come off of.
- downerending 7y ago> It would be like asking a pro NBA player to also take a shot at being a pro NFL player. I meant, the point of being rich is that you don't have to be a pro anything. You can just learn to grow radishes, or whatever suits your fancy. Or just sit and read the great books.
- brianyu8 7y ago“The performance of a 512-node Anton machine is over 17,000 nanoseconds of simulated time per day for a protein-water system consisting of 23,558 atoms.[5] In comparison, MD codes running on general-purpose parallel computers with hundreds or thousands of processor cores achieve simulation rates of up to a few hundred nanoseconds per day on the same chemical system.” 17,000 ns of simulation per day sounds crazy small but I wonder how that compares to the timescale of molecular interactions. How helpful have Antons been to pharma research etc?
- cing 7y agoThere's quite a nice plot from a review paper of D.E. Shaw Research that lists the timescale of several biological processes (and compares it to other experimental methods), https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-biophys-042910-155245 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-bioph... (Figure 2). Anton has been extremely helpful for studying the basic science of protein dynamics in academia and has been applied in industry (namely at Relay Therapeutics), but drug discovery is a long process so we still haven't seen the fruits of those long simulations yet.
- deepnotderp 7y agoI don't think it's been very helpful, since computational modeling in general doesn't seem to be a cure all for drug discovery challenges
- Reelin 7y agoIt probably would be a cure all, but the computers are still _way_ too slow!
- unemphysbro 7y agoUsing highly optimized code for that system size, I used to get ~500 ns per day using a single 2080. Some references: 10^-3 ns - Hydrogen bond vibrations, 100+ ns - Protein side chains moving, 1000 - 10000 ns is the timescale of protein folding
- 7y ago
- person_of_color 7y agoIts really hard to get a job at DESRES.
- sabujp 7y agoprobably as a swe or research scientist, yes, i was contacted by them for an SA position ~6 years ago
- andbberger 7y agoAll these years running laps around everyone else doing MD simulations - what do they have to show for it in terms of discoveries?
- unemphysbro 7y agoIt is strange that their academic output isn't on par with some of the more prominent bio-molecular simulations research groups. But I don't know much about their internals, perhaps, they're leasing a good bit of computer time to biotech companies.
- LolWolf 7y agoI’d say this is very much on purpose (I worked there for two summers, also with one of the people in this thread). DESRES is very, very particular about the papers it puts out, so, while there is an incredible amount of great science with brilliant people who were mostly poached from academia, only the very top papers ever get published. Many more are written or kept as internal documents, but the firm is very particular about only publishing very impactful research. Unlike in academia, there isn’t a push to publish only okay or average quality research since funding is not public and there are no metrics to push.
- unemphysbro 7y agoI used to run simulations on this big guy :)
- ggm 7y agoWithout breaching NDA, do you think it was able to show outcomes which the naieve computer scientist would say justified the approach?
- sabujp 7y agohow is this compared to gpus?
- unemphysbro 7y agoAnton is MD calculations implemented in hardware, so an applications specific machine.
- antoniuschan99 7y agoThank you first time hearing about this
- entropi 7y agoMy master's thesis work was on MD simulations. My setups had around 150k atoms each, and it took months and hundreds of cores to finish any meaningful simulation. I was incredibly jealous of that machine. But frankly I am still not convinced of the usefulness of the MD studies except for a few cases (docking studies, etc.).
- Daub 7y agoNow seems as good a time as any to share a replica of an Antoine van Leeuwenhoek microscope that my father made. The lens he made in the same way as the original... heating up glass to a semi molten stake, then letting a drop fall through the air. By the time it had landed and cooled...voila! A spherical lens. https://www.dropbox.com/s/in4x3vjysw1o1wc/IMG_0291.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/in4x3vjysw1o1wc/IMG_0291.JPG?dl=0
- idoby 7y agoCan we please have more information about this? And better pictures?
- Daub 7y agoMy pleasure. Thanks for taking an interest: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qhs8qf2qw5e4n35/micro_01.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/qhs8qf2qw5e4n35/micro_01.jpg?dl=0 From the back https://www.dropbox.com/s/4vl3rbfkelf1nv9/micro_02.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/4vl3rbfkelf1nv9/micro_02.jpg?dl=0 Same, but annotated. 1 = The lens housing 2 = The 'stage'. Basically, just a pin that you stick the subject onto 3 = The handle. using this, the assembly is positioned in front of a strong light. https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xra81bu2qdsxj9/micro_03.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xra81bu2qdsxj9/micro_03.jpg?dl=0 The front, showing the viewing hole The whole thing actually works. The lens is hit or miss (literally), and it shows. Plenty of chromatic aberration. Basically just a droplet of glass. He tried many times to get it right. Why did he make it? Well... he has a fascination with old technology. He was a founding member of the British Vintage Wireless Society, and has written a book on the subject of old radios. Also one on ancient navigation techniques. He is an old fashioned polymath. Also have in my possession a replica of Galileo's first telescope. Also works fine.
- idoby 7y agoVery cool. Thanks!