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Tachyon is a parallel/multiprocessor ray tracing software. It is a parallel ray tracing library for use on distributed memory parallel computers, shared memory computers, and clusters of workstations. Tachyon implements rendering features such as ambient occlusion lighting, depth-of-field focal blur, shadows, reflections, and others. It was originally developed for the Intel iPSC/860 by John Stone for his M.S. thesis at University of Missouri-Rolla. Tachyon subsequently became a more functional and complete ray tracing engine, and it is now incorporated into a number of other open source software packages such as VMD, and
Paragon XP/S 150 MP
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The ORNL XP/S 150 MP was the first platform Tachyon supported that combined both large-scale distributed memory message passing among nodes, and shared memory multithreading within nodes. Adaptation of Tachyon to a variety of conventional Unix-based workstation platforms and early clusters followed, including porting to the IBM SP2. Tachyon was incorporated into the PARAFLOW CFD code to allow in-situ volume visualization of supersonic combustor flows performed on the Paragon XP/S at NASA Langley Research Center, providing a significant performance gain over conventional post-processing visualization approaches that had been used previously. Beginning in 1999, support for Tachyon was incorporated into the molecular graphics program VMD, and this began an ongoing period co-development of Tachyon and VMD where many new Tachyon features were added specifically for molecular graphics. Tachyon was used to render the winning image illustration category for the NSF 2004 Visualization Challenge. In 2007, Tachyon added support for ambient occlusion lighting, which was one of the features that made it increasingly popular for molecular visualization in conjunction with VMD. VMD and Tachyon were gradually adapted to support routine visualization and analysis tasks on clusters, and later for large petascale supercomputers. Tachyon was used to produce figures, movies, and the Natur
cover image
of the atomic structure of the HIV-1 capsid solved by Zhao et al. in 2013, on the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer at NCSA, U. Illinois. Both CPU and GPU versions of Tachyon were used to render images of the SARS-CoV-2 virion, spike protein, and aerosolized virion in three separate ACM Gordon Bell COVID-19 research projects, including the winning project at Supercomputing 2020, and two finalist projects at Supercomputing 2021.
SPEC MPI 2007
benchmark suite. Beyond Tachyon's typical use as tool for rendering high quality images, likely due to its portability and inclusion in SPEC MPI 2007, it has also been used as a test case and point of comparison for a variety of research projects related to parallel rendering and visualization, cloud computing, and parallel computing, compilers, runtime systems, and computer architecture, performance analysis tools, and energy efficiency of HPC systems.
Tachyon Parallel/Multiprocessor Ray Tracing System website
Tachyon ray tracer (built into VMD)
John Stone's M.S. thesis describing the earliest versions of Tachyon
Tachyon is a parallel/multiprocessor ray tracing software. It is a parallel ray tracing library for use on distributed memory parallel computers, shared memory computers, and clusters of workstations. Tachyon implements rendering features such as ambient occlusion lighting, depth-of-field focal blur, shadows, reflections, and others. It was originally developed for the Intel iPSC/860 by John Stone for his M.S. thesis at University of Missouri-Rolla. Tachyon subsequently became a more functional and complete ray tracing engine, and it is now incorporated into a number of other open source software packages such as VMD, and SageMath
SageMath (previously Sage or SAGE, "System for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation") is a computer algebra system (CAS) with features covering many aspects of mathematics, including algebra, combinatorics, graph theory, numerical analysis, nu ...
. Tachyon is released under a permissive license (included in the tarball).
Evolution and Features
Tachyon was originally developed for the Intel iPSC/860, a distributed memory parallel computer based on a hypercube interconnect topology based on the Intel i860, an early RISC CPU with VLIW architecture and . Tachyon was originally written using Intel's proprietary NX message passing interface for the iPSC series, but it was ported to the earliest versions of MPI shortly thereafter in 1995. Tachyon was adapted to run on theIntel Paragon
The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of massively parallel supercomputers that was produced by Intel in the 1990s. The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental ''Touchstone Delta'' system that was built at Caltech, launc ...
platform using thParagon XP/S 150 MP
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The ORNL XP/S 150 MP was the first platform Tachyon supported that combined both large-scale distributed memory message passing among nodes, and shared memory multithreading within nodes. Adaptation of Tachyon to a variety of conventional Unix-based workstation platforms and early clusters followed, including porting to the IBM SP2. Tachyon was incorporated into the PARAFLOW CFD code to allow in-situ volume visualization of supersonic combustor flows performed on the Paragon XP/S at NASA Langley Research Center, providing a significant performance gain over conventional post-processing visualization approaches that had been used previously. Beginning in 1999, support for Tachyon was incorporated into the molecular graphics program VMD, and this began an ongoing period co-development of Tachyon and VMD where many new Tachyon features were added specifically for molecular graphics. Tachyon was used to render the winning image illustration category for the NSF 2004 Visualization Challenge. In 2007, Tachyon added support for ambient occlusion lighting, which was one of the features that made it increasingly popular for molecular visualization in conjunction with VMD. VMD and Tachyon were gradually adapted to support routine visualization and analysis tasks on clusters, and later for large petascale supercomputers. Tachyon was used to produce figures, movies, and the Natur
cover image
of the atomic structure of the HIV-1 capsid solved by Zhao et al. in 2013, on the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer at NCSA, U. Illinois. Both CPU and GPU versions of Tachyon were used to render images of the SARS-CoV-2 virion, spike protein, and aerosolized virion in three separate ACM Gordon Bell COVID-19 research projects, including the winning project at Supercomputing 2020, and two finalist projects at Supercomputing 2021.
Use in Parallel Computing Demonstrations, Training, and Benchmarking
Owing in part to its portability to a diverse range of platforms Tachyon has been used as a test case for a variety of parallel computing and compiler research articles. In 1999, John Stone assisted Bill Magro with adaptation of Tachyon to support early versions of the OpenMP directive-based parallel computing standard, using Kuck and Associates' KCC compiler. Tachyon was shown as a demo performing interactive ray tracing on DEC Alpha workstations using KCC and OpenMP. In 2000, Intel acquired Kuck and Associates Inc., and Tachyon continued to be used as an OpenMP demonstration. Intel later used Tachyon to develop a variety of programming examples for its Threading Building Blocks (TBB) parallel programming system, where an old version of the program continues to be incorporated as an example to the present day. In 2006, Tachyon was selected by the SPEC HPG for inclusion in thSPEC MPI 2007
benchmark suite. Beyond Tachyon's typical use as tool for rendering high quality images, likely due to its portability and inclusion in SPEC MPI 2007, it has also been used as a test case and point of comparison for a variety of research projects related to parallel rendering and visualization, cloud computing, and parallel computing, compilers, runtime systems, and computer architecture, performance analysis tools, and energy efficiency of HPC systems.
See also
*Visual Molecular Dynamics
Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) is a molecular modelling and Visualization (computer graphics), visualization computer program. VMD is developed mainly as a tool to view and analyze the results of molecular dynamics simulations. It also includes ...
External links
Tachyon Parallel/Multiprocessor Ray Tracing System website
Tachyon ray tracer (built into VMD)
John Stone's M.S. thesis describing the earliest versions of Tachyon
References
{{3D software 3D rendering software for Linux Cross-platform software Free 3D graphics software Free computer-aided design software Global illumination software