TeraScope is a framework and a suite of tools for interactively browsing and visualizing large terascale data sets. Unique to TeraScope is its utilization of the Optiputer paradigm to treat distributed computer clusters as a single giant computer, where the dedicated optical networks that connect the clusters serve as the computer’s system bus. TeraScope explores one aspect of the Optiputer architecture by employing a distributed pool of memory, called LambdaRAM, that serves as a massive data cache for supporting parallel data mining and visualization algorithms.