Tachyon (software)

[1] 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.

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 used to produce figures, movies, and the Nature 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.

[citation needed] 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.

Satellite tobacco mosaic virus molecular graphics produced in VMD and rendered using Tachyon. The scene is shown with a combination of direct lighting and ambient occlusion lighting to improve the visibility of pockets and cavities. The VMD axes are shown as an example of rendering of non-molecular geometry.
Tachyon rendering of a 1-billion atom aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 virion (COVID-19).
Tachyon rendering of a 1-billion atom aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 virion (COVID-19).
Intel iPSC/860 32-node parallel computer running a Tachyon performance test. August 22, 1995.