DE Shaw & Company takes its very smartest people (and a non-trivial portion of their profits) and puts them to work at DE Shaw Research, where they work on protein folding and other computational biology that could help cure cancer and HIV. I think that's a pretty worthwhile use of talent :-D
From what I was told, David Shaw is spending most of his time on the research group these days.
They ostensibly don't consider themselves a finance firm - they consider themselves a tech firm that will use their skills wherever they can to increase efficiency and make money.
The problem is that DE Shaw Research made a loosing bet recently when they decided to design custom silicon to solve the protein folding problem while everyone else kept using commodity hardware and worked on improving the software.
I saw a guy I know at a wedding a few weeks ago who works at Shaw Research, and I asked him about this. He didn't give explicit details on custom vs. commodity performance, but he did say they had machines up and running and giving novel results.
I doubt it is fair to say they are ignoring software improvements. I saw Shaw talk about the machine architecture and he had a lot to say about balancing programmability for later software improvements vs. specialized computational resources. Also, it was his algorithmic improvements, the "neutral territory" methods, that were inspiration for the machine. Are NT methods still state of the art for molecular simulation?
How do you know that this is a losing bet? It's still pretty early days. And aren't they hedged with their work on Desmond, which is MD software for commodity clusters?
Custom hardware for chemical physics has been tried multiple times before since the late 70s. I’ve heard most companies only found financial success through bloated government contracts and the custom hardware only provided limited advantages for researchers. In all cases these advantages died out quickly with advances in commodity hardware.
Anton is impressive in that it can provide millisecond long trajectories of protein/solvent systems, but single trajectories are of limited utility. You need many (1000s) of such trajectories for statistical analysis of the molecular system. Further, there already exist several clever methods that leverage chemical statistical mechanics to provide the same analysis without the need for single long trajectories. As an example, see Pande’s work developing Markov models of protein folding using millions of short trajectories between metastable states. This method has already provided a complete statistical analysis of protein folding for proteins that fold on times scales an order of magnitude beyond what Anton can simulate.
As for Desmond, there already exists a plethora of free MD programs (MMTK, LAMMPS, NAMD, CHARMM, Gromacs, and many more). Many of these, especially Gromacs, have already been highly optimized for a range of hardware and I wouldn’t expect Desmond to surpass these free codes by a margin worth dropping dollars.
Personally, I still have high hopes for DE Shaw Research, I just don’t see how their current offerings will turn a significant profit or greatly advance science. I’d love to be proven wrong, and I’m sure they’ll have plenty of additional novel future projects, some of which could be paradigm-shift-changing for chemical physics and molecular biology. My guess is that such advances won’t come from their hardware geniuses, but instead from their math/physics geniuses that will develop new statistical mechanics methods to bend & contract in silico time.
i'm not convinced they're smarter than anyone else. i'd rather invest in renaissance or citadel...
my coworkers at morgan were all physics or cs phds. and a consulting expert got a nobel prize while i was there. amusingly, i interviewed at google around the same time, and some of the engineers were condescending about the quality and education of my coworkers.
Renaissance over Citadel. If I'm not mistaken, Renaissance is purely automated trading. No traders or trading floor in the conventional sense. Plus they weathered the fallout of 08 much better than Citadel.
What's sad is that these smart people, including ones I've met while working as a SysAdmin for a Prop Trading firm often don't have access to the capital to start their own shops. This is due to the incestuous nature of the Finance world, where it's a lot more about who you know than what you know.
Sadly, they're often in the employ of third-rate CEOs, who always get a cut off the top, and pay the producers a mere fraction of what they made for the firm and their clients.
The Medallion Fund has its own internal trading desk, staffed by approximately 20 traders, and trades from Monday opening bell in Australia through Friday closing bell in the US.
it was just an offhand remark. "if you came to google, you'd get to work with mostly phds, instead of who you work with now" -- without even asking about the kind of people i worked with.
granted rentech probably has desco beat (at least in terms of recruiting toughness - the only metric I'm really in a position to judge by). But I don't think anyone would deny that desco is part of that top tier too.
FWIW, in my experience the handful of citadel programmers I've interacted with aren't quite in the same league as shaw/rentech/getco/jane st/etc. I have no idea how that reflects on their returns though ;-)
Peter J. Weinberger (W in AWK) worked at RenTec before moving to Google.
I would not invest in anything from them however. Medallion has been closed for new money for many years now and all other offerings performed poorly to say it politely.
I once had a very challenging technical job interview there. Several interviewers had PhD in Computer Science.