Fractal application revisited

This year, I wrote a fractal demo application using DSS/CCR

Distributed Agents and Fractals using DSS/VPL

Now, I’m exploring parallel execution using Task Parallel Library, threads, or MPI (Message Passing Interface). But before writing new versions of fractal app using parallel programming, I added to my ajcodekatas Google code, a base application, WinForm Fractal, that generates fractal images using the GUI thread:

http://code.google.com/p/ajcodekatas/source/browse/#svn/trunk/FractalExample

 

There is a class library, with core classes, and a WinForm project, that uses a Calculator object to calculate a Sector of fractal. An excerpt of that invocation:

 

        private void Calculate()
        {
            Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(pcbFractal.Width, pcbFractal.Height);
            pcbFractal.Image = bitmap;
            pcbFractal.Refresh();

            realWidth = realDelta * pcbFractal.Width;
            imgHeight = imgDelta * pcbFractal.Height;

            realMin = realCenter - realWidth / 2;
            imgMin = imgCenter - imgHeight / 2;

            int width = pcbFractal.Width;
            int height = pcbFractal.Height;

            SectorInfo sectorinfo = new SectorInfo()
            {
                FromX = 0,
                FromY = 0,
                Width = width,
                Height = height,
                RealMinimum = realMin,
                ImgMinimum = imgMin,
                Delta = realDelta,
                MaxIterations = colors.Length,
                MaxValue = 4
            };

            Calculator calculator = new Calculator();
            Sector sector = calculator.CalculateSector(sectorinfo);
            this.DrawValues(sector.FromX, sector.FromY, sector.Width, sector.Height, sector.Values);
        }

Run Fractal.GUI project, and click on Calculate:

You can drag the mouse to select a zone. Releasing the mouse, a new image is generated. You can change the colors, that are randomly selected:

Next Steps

I want to add new versions:

- Multithread version

- Parallel version using Task Parallel Library

- Distributed version (MPI.NET? AjMessages?)

If you are impatient, there is an excellent tutorial, implementing a fractal application using HPC 2008 and the above technologies, ready to download from:

Learning Parallel Programming — from shared-memory multi-threading to distributed-memory multi-processing

Suggestions, comments, welcome!

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en
http://twitter.com/ajlopez