Anton is a massively parallel supercomputer designed and built by D. E. Shaw Research in New York, first running in 2008.
An Anton machine consists of a substantial number of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), interconnected by a specialized high-speed, three-dimensional torus network.
Most of the calculation of electrostatic and van der Waals forces is performed by the high-throughput interaction subsystem (HTIS).
The remaining calculations, including the bond forces and the fast Fourier transforms (used for long-range electrostatics), are performed by the flexible subsystem.
[4] 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.