The Anton computers are purpose-built by DE Shaw research for molecular dynamics simulations. They achieve performance up to an order of magnitude faster than can be achieved with commodity hardware, but don't seem to be used all that much by the wider computational chemistry community. This is despite the fact that limitations on simulation timescales is a major impediment to using simulations to guide experiments, leading to all kinds of intricate theoretical methods to deduce longer-timescale properties from relatively short simulation trajectories.
Having read a bit about the Anton machines, which have been around for over a decade now, I'm perplexed as to why they haven't been more widely used. Is it because they are too inflexible, not available to enough researchers, not helpful in solving scientific problems, or is there some other reason I'm missing?
