Name : Viraj Sabhaya
Class : Operating Systems
ID : 1001828871

Fractal Assignment

Description

In order to study parallelism, we must have a problem that will take a significant amount of computation. We will generate images in the Mandelbrot set a well known fractal structure. The set is interesting both mathematically and aesthetically because it has an infinitely recursive structure. You can zoom into any part and find swirls, spirals, snowflakes, and other fun structures, as long as you are willing to do enough computation.
Run make to build the code. If you run the program with no arguments, it generates a default image and writes it to mandel.bmp. You can see all of the command line options with mandel -h, and use them to override the defaults.
This program uses the escape time algorithm.
For each pixel in the image, it starts with the x and y position, and then computes a recurrence relation until it exceeds a fixed value or runs for max iterations.
Then, the pixel is assigned a color according to the number of iterations completed. An easy color scheme is to assign a gray value proportional to the number of iterations. The max value controls the amount of work done by the algorithm. If we increase max, then we can see much more detail in the set, but it may take much longer to compute.