The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center earned an NIH grant to fund a third-generation Anton supercomputer

A third-generation Anton supercomputer (Anton 3) will soon arrive at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) thanks to a $3.15-million, five-year award from the National Institutes of Health that will fund the system's operations. The grant will make the system available without cost for noncommercial use by biomedical researchers at U.S. universities and other not-for-profit institutions.

The Anton family of supercomputers, developed by D.E. Shaw Research, was specially designed for atomic-level simulation of molecules relevant to biology — for example, DNA, proteins, and drugs. The technology gives scientists the ability to simulate interactions between biomolecules that inform disease research, basic science and drug design two orders of magnitude faster than possible with general-purpose supercomputers. Like its predecessors, the new Anton was designed from the ground up around a new custom chip to best exploit the capabilities offered by new technologies.

Philip Blood and Marcela Madrid will be the project leads at PSC, a joint center of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

“With the latest Anton system, we will be able to provide researchers with a unique resource capable of producing results in days that would take years on any other resource,” said Blood, scientific director and PI of the Anton project at PSC. “The new system will spark innovative studies that will challenge and shift current paradigms in the simulation of biomolecular systems.”

Since the beginning of the Anton project at PSC in 2010, users nationwide have used the system to obtain long-timescale simulations resulting in more than 440 papers with 20,000 citations. Examples of the breakthrough science enabled by Anton at PSC include:

• studies of ion channel opening, a process key to the control of excitations in the central nervous system and immune cells
• the complex lipid-protein interactions in SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19
• the mechanisms underlying the CRISPR genome-editing machinery
• the molecular mechanisms of amyloid self-assembly, implicated in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease

Time on the machine will be allotted based on research proposals submitted to an independent expert committee convened by the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences.

The system will begin operations at PSC in the spring of 2025. Faculty and staff members at U.S. academic or nonprofit research institutions, including researchers without previous experience on Anton systems, are invited to apply for an allocation. The application deadline is Monday, Oct. 14. More information can be found here.