Mandelbrot

A distributed java fractal generator

Fractals! Yes, you remember those fun filled wasters of CPU cycles that were cool back in the early 90's. Well, here they are back on your monitor -- as self-similar and fractionally dimensional as ever.

Why dredge up this colorful but mostly useless mathematical curiousity from another decade? Well, I wanted to make a quick and dirty experiment in parallel processing. Inspired by SETI@home and other distributed computing projects, I wanted to somehow strap together all the junky old computers I have lying around and get them to do something cool. Or, at least something that used to be cool in the 90's.

So, in a frantic one man geek-fest, I whipped up some code and... promptly got bored with it and dropped the whole idea for several months. Finally, I got around to a little more hacking and the result is a distributed parallel mandelbrot fractal generator.

Reasons (lame excuses) for this project:

• Try out distrubuted parallel programming
• Get tangled up in some fun concurrency problems
• Munge up some perfectly good design patterns
• Practice with Swing GUI components (To what purpose? I don't know)
• Make gnarly-rad pictures

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Mandelbrot uses log4j and Doug Lea's concurrency classes.
• The program Mandelbrot is named after this guy.
• in order to use awt classes on a headless server you need to set a special secret property: -Djava.awt.headless=true. The program sets this in the system properties automatically in the class CommandLineOptions, but this may not work with non-Sun implementations.