The NSF-sponsored Teravoxel project was motivated by investigations of flow turbulence, and designed to handle both laboratory and simulation data. As part of the project, a novel laser-illuminated KFS digital imaging system was developed. The 1024×1024 pixel camera has low noise and high dynamic range. It operates at up to 1000 frames per second and generates over 2GB per second. The data is stored on two local Datawulfs for subsequent transport to CACR for processing. A significant component of the TeraVoxel system is CACR’s Shared Heterogeneous Cluster (SHC). The SHC is used to perform theoretical predications via simulation, and to process the very large data sets produced by the camera hardware.

A six-node volume rendering farm was constructed, with each node equipped with a 1 GB TeraRecon VolumePro 1000 rendering card. Custom software was developed to run interactively with a GTK/GL interface. The farm can geometrically correct and render 1000 frames of a 1024³ volume in under 30 minutes.

The TeraVoxel project is a collaboration between Caltech’s Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories (GALCIT), the NNSA ASC Center, and CACR. The final Teravoxel report can be found in the CACR archive of the Caltech Library System’s Digital Collection.