D.E. Shaw current is one of the leaders (if not the leader) in molecular dynamics (i.e., studying the motion of the specific atoms in a molecule, or watching the dynamics of a chemical reaction), and it's a really hard problem. Roughly speaking, you have to calculate a constant (but also fairly large) number of operations to calculate the configuration of the molecule(s) for every _femtosecond_ of time. It would be great to see things happen at a tens of microseconds, but that is a LOT of computation.

This is useful becaue it would mean that we could see exactly how reactions take place and perhaps even engineer interesting chemical/biological phenomena. Certain processes in your body depend on proteins moving certain substances or reacting in certain ways, and if we can simulate all that with a computer, we can start to build chemical/biological tools for, for example, fighting certain diseases