Overcoming Communication Latency Barriers in Massively Parallel Scientific Computation

Anton, a massively parallel special-purpose machine that accelerates molecular dynamics simulations by orders of magnitude, uses a combination of specialized hardware mechanisms and restructured software algorithms to reduce and hide communication latency. Anton delivers end-to-end internode latency significantly lower than any other large-scale parallel machine, and its critical-path communication time for molecular dynamics simulations is less than 3 percent that of the next-fastest platform.