[Beowulf] Intro question

[Prentice Bisbal]

Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> 
> On Dec 3, 2008, at 8:25 AM, malcolm croucher wrote:
> 
>> Its gonna be used for computational chemisty , not academic but more
>> private / entrepreneurship. I been doing a lot of research in this
>> area for a while and was hoping to do some more on my own.
>>
> 
> That's most interesting, if i google for your name i just get hits in
> the financial world. How's that possible?
> 

Vincent,

You clearly haven't heard of David E. Shaw or know what he's up these
days. Here's the Cliff Notes version:

He made billions on Wall Street using computer models of the market,
then started Schrodinger, a leading vendor of computational chemistry
software (my previous employer used it heavily), where he actually wrote
some of the code in their products himself.

A couple of years ago, his company (D.E Shaw REsearch)had large (~1/4
page) ads in Linux Magazine looking for top Linux HPC admins to
build/maintain a highly specialized computer that would be the fastest
computer in the world for biochemistry applications (protein folding,
etc.). He's very secretive, but the word on the street is that it will
use custom processors (FPGAs?) specially designed for molecular bio/comp
chem calculations, and is being built at a site in upstate NY.

Google him. He's an interesting fellow. Here's a few links to get you
started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Shaw
http://www.deshawresearch.com/
http://www.deshawresearch.com/chiefscientist.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/mojo_400/43_shaw.html


-- 
Prentice