Anton is a special purpose supercomputer for biomolecular simulation designed and constructed by D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES). PSC's current system is known as Anton 2 and is a successor to the original Anton 1 machine hosted here.
Anton 2, the next-generation Anton supercomputer, is a 128 node system, made available without cost by DESRES for non-commercial research use by US universities and other not-for-profit institutions, and is hosted by PSC with support from the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences. It replaced the original Anton 1 system in the fall of 2016.
Anton was designed to dramatically increase the speed of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations compared with the previous state of the art, allowing biomedical researchers to understand the motions and interactions of proteins and other biologically important molecules over much longer time periods than was previously accessible to computational study. The MD research community is using the Anton 2 machine at PSC to investigate important biological phenomena that due to their intrinsically long time scales have been outside the reach of even the most powerful general-purpose scientific computers. Application areas include biomolecular energy transformation, ion channel selectivity and gating, drug interactions with proteins and nucleic acids, protein folding and protein-membrane signaling.