Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 188: Visiting scholar

　　Any other scholar, after hearing this simple request, would probably be ecstatic with excitement.

　　After all, supercalibre was expensive, even renting it wasn't cheap, and this promise from David was the equivalent of a million dollars in funding. In contrast, his request was merely, to add the name of D.E. Shaw Research Institute to the location of the thesis research institute.

　　After hearing David's trivial request, Orion was not as ecstatic as those poor theoretical researchers, but he still felt a small surprise from his request.

　　Compared to research in lucrative applied fields, theoretical research was bound to lose money, and it was bound to lose a lot of it.

　　For such a request, Orion naturally wouldn't refuse.

　　Nodding, he said readily, "That's easy."

　　......

　　In a certain sense, Orion's choice of Anton for this experiment had a certain degree of inevitability.

　　General purpose supercomputers, in general, were not very efficient at performing molecular dynamics simulations.

　　However, Anton, which does its calculations entirely on purpose-built ASICs, every chip is designed for computational chemistry.

　　With a total of 512 nodes, it can simulate a 'protein-water system consisting of 23,558 atoms' for more than 17,000 nanoseconds per day.

　　In contrast, for a general-purpose supercomputer with the same number of processors, the simulation rate for parallel computation on the same chemical system would only reach a few hundred nanoseconds per day.

　　This is why Anton has been called the nuclear weapon of computational chemistry.

　　It has to be said that David is indeed a genius.

　　Whether it was in the field of finance or massively parallel computing or polymer chemistry, it was all the same.

　　If it wasn't for the fact that Anton was simply too expensive for general research organisations to afford, it was possible that sometime in the future, the Nobel Committee would even consider nominating him.

　　Just like biologist Jacques Dubochet, who was nominated for the Chemistry Prize in '17 for his cryo-electron microscopy technique ......

　　After letting Jericho drive back in his car, Orion sent an application to Columbia University through Princeton for a month-long visit as a visiting scholar here.

　　For a renowned scholar like him to come and visit, Columbia University naturally welcomed it. It even arranged a temporary dormitory for him nearby the institute in order to facilitate his research.

　　Under the condition of sufficient funding, theoretical research, which did not involve patent disputes, was always easier to reach a consensus than research in the application field.

　　This was especially true for the two men who were not short of money.

　　After signing a co-operative research agreement, which simply defined the scope of work of both parties and the authorship of papers, the experiment was quickly arranged.

　　For the collaborative research project, David also showed the greatest importance.

　　Not only did he put off the scheduled experiments, but he also deployed the entire D.E. Shaw Research Institute into this work.

　　Soon enough, Orion got to see Anton's strong power.

　　On the day the experiment was conducted, inside the Anton supercomputing centre.