Interest in a distributed Mandelbrot?

[Adam Curtin]

[[Ed's Note: This letter was originally a letter directed to me; however
Adam thought it might be worth sharing with the Sun community in general
and gave me permission to reword it a bit and post it if I wanted. If
interest is high enough, he has indicated that he would be willing to make
this program available via the archives. -bdg]]

I have a trick little Mandelbrot program which you may be interested in.
~1500 lines all told, It incorporates the usual depth control and zoom
facilities, but most interestingly it uses an original (tho' possibly not
unique :-) method for calculating the set, which improves speed
considerably.

In addition, the program is arranged so that one client runs on the
viewer's machine (colour display is pretty much essential) and a number of
servers run on that or any number of other hosts around the network,
communicating by stream sockets. This provides a useful speedup on most
views, even on our system of 3/60M, 3/60C and 386i!

Two versions of the server are provided, one started manually and the
other kicked off by inetd. The client can be given a list of hostnames to
check for servers or will try to connect to every host returned by
gethostent().  A stand-alone, single-process version is also provided.

The servers should run on any machine capable of talking sockets to the
client - I've tested it on Sun3 with Sun386 and it works, presumably it
will be just as happy with HPs, Silicon Graphics, ...

The front-end is SunView. There is a bit of a glitch in that department, but
I'll provide more info if you'd like it.

A. D. Curtin				Tel  : +44 438 753430
British Aerospace (Dynamics) Ltd.	Fax  : +44 438 753377
PB 230, PO Box 19, Six Hills Way,	Email: adam at ste.dyn.bae.co.uk
Stevenage, SG1 2DA, UK.  		UUCP : ...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!bae-st!adam
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	Fun-to-be-alive:	"My other car is an FJ1200"