Tachyon Parallel / Multiprocessor
Ray Tracing System
johns@ks.uiuc.edu
john.stone@gmail.com

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About Tachyon

These pages contain information about my work in parallel rendering. I've been developing a parallel ray tracing library named Tachyon, for use on distributed memory parallel computers, shared memory computers, and clusters of workstations. Tachyon uses MPI for distributed memory parallel computers, threads for multi-core and SMP shared memory machines, and can support both simultaneously for clusters of multi-core or SMP systems.

Tachyon supports typical ray tracing features, most of the common geometric primitives, shading and texturing modes, etc. It also supports less common features such as HDR image output, ambient occlusion lighting, and support for various triangle mesh and volumetric texture formats beneficial for molecular visualization, as used by VMD. Tachyon is also used by the SAGE open source mathematics suite.

Tachyon has become a popular application for demonstration and testing of OpenMP compilers, threading toolkits, and parallel benchmarks. A modified version of an older Tachyon distribution is included as an example with the Intel Threading Building Blocks multi-core/multithreading library. A recent version of Tachyon has been incorporated into the SPEC MPI2007 benchmark suite.

Active Projects

I'm presently working on making Tachyon more efficient for real-time ray tracing, and to improve its performance and features for continued use as the primary external renderer for VMD. I'm also evaluating the use of GPGPU techniques for acceleration of some parts of the rendering process. Here is a somewhat up-to-date list of supported platforms.