fractal-demo

fractal-demo is a distributed fractal-calculator based on OpenCL, Qt 4 and CAF. Controll unit, calculation units and server/screen unit are distributed. OpenCL allows the usage of GPUs.

Screenshots

Mandelbrot

Burning Ship

Dependencies

Since Qt is used as a GUI make sure cmake finds the Qt bin.

• CAF: CAF
• Qt: qt.nokia.com

Compiler

• GCC >= 4.8

Get the source

git clone https://github.com/actor-framework/fractal-demo.git
cd fractal-demo

Build the apps

./configure
make

Cmake needs to find qt. If it does not by default, add the qt bin directory to your PATH.

export PATH=<PATH_TO_SDK>/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.1/gcc/bin/:$PATH

It is possibile to use OpenCL for the calculation. To do this you need to compile libcppa and this project with the OpenCL option.

./configure --with-opencl
make

Usage:

fractal-demo allows you two ways to make a connection between worker and server.

• Workers are published first and than the server gets with -n domain:port the location of published workers.
• Server starts first and workers connect with -H server_domain:port to the server.

In this example the second point is shown. To calculate, controll and server on one computer without openCL:

# Terminal 1
# start server and publish at port 7000
.build/bin/fractal-demo -s -p 7000

# Terminal 2
# publish two workers (CPU) on port 7000 of your client.
.build/bin/fractal-demo -w 2 -H localhost:7000

# Terminal 3
# start controller with server on localhost
.build/bin/fractal-demo -c -H localhost

Note: Of course you can start everything in one terminal. To do this, append & to end of each command. If you want to quit them all you can just type: killall fractal-cppa.

In case you want to enable OpenCL, add the -o flag to client start.

.build/bin/fractal-demo -w 2 -H localhost:7000 -o

As above-mentioned, fractal-demo is distributed. That means, you can split up each terminal on diffrent computer and add even more workers trough diffrent computer.

Operating Systems

Tested on OSX, and Linux.