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MandelSpawn, a distributed Mandelbrot program
Version 0.06
This is MandelSpawn, a distributed Mandelbrot program. It allows you
to calculate pictures of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets in parallel on
several machines connected by a network.
MandelSpawn is GNU-style free software and is available under the GNU
General Public License, version 1. See the file COPYING for details.
To run MandelSpawn, you need a machine running some flavour of Unix
with a BSD-style socket library. To use MandelSpawn interactively you
also need X11R4. There is support for X11R2 and X11R3, but some
features (most notably the popup menu) will be absent under those
versions. MandelSpawn has not yet been tested under X11R5.
MandelSpawn uses the Xlib and Xt libraries and under X11R4/X11R5 it
also uses Xaw.
To benefit from the parallel processing features of MandelSpawn, you
will also want to run computation servers on one or more additional
machines (or additional CPUs on the same machine). Typically these
additional machines are workstations that are mostly idle or doing
bursty, interactive work. Because the servers are very compact and
run at nice 10 by default, they don't cause any noticeable performance
degradation. MandelSpawn is fault-tolerant in the sense that it is
not affected much by servers getting heavily loaded or crashing in the
middle of the computation. The server machines don't need to run X,
but they must be connected to the host through a reasonably fast IP
network supporting UDP.
If you are using a Vax, i386 or 680x0, you are likely to get better
performance by using fixed-point arithmetic instead of floating point.
To take advantage of the inline assembly language fixed-point support,
you need to compile the computation server with GCC version 1.36 or
newer.
New features in version 0.06 include some portability fixes for System
V, NeXT, and HP-UX, support for fixed-point arithmetic on MIPS
processors, a slightly more informative "Usage:" message, a workaround
for a bug in some Sony X servers, and faster operation with
little-endian monochrome displays.
Also new is "bms" (Batch MandelSpawn), a batch-mode client program
which may be useful for those who don't have X, and for those who want
to print pictures larger than their X displays. Because this is the
first release of bms, it still has limited functionality and is
probably still buggy. Please report any bugs you find.
MandelSpawn has been successfully run on at least Sun 3, Sun 4, Sony
NEWS, MicroVAX II, i386/Mach, and DECstation systems. Some System V
support has been included starting with version 0.05, but is still
not thoroughly tested.
Please report any bugs to gson@niksula.hut.fi. Please remember to
state your computer model, operating system and version, X toolkit
version, and MandelSpawn version (from running "xms -version" or
"bms -version"). Also remember to include the exact error message
you are getting.
MandelSpawn was developed as a student project at the Helsinki
University of Technology Computer Science Laboratory.
MandelSpawn is in no way related to the distributed Mandelbrot program
by Rob Swiston and Chuck Simmons that was posted to alt.sources in
April, 1990, despite a surprising number of similarities. To my
knowledge, both programs have been developed completely independently.
This distribution is available by anonymous FTP from funic.funet.fi,
in /pub/X11/contrib/mandelspawn-0.06.tar.Z.
The distribution is divided into three directories:
xms-0.06/ The X11-based interactive client program
bms-0.06/ The batch-mode client program
mslaved-0.06/ The computation server
Some files, including this one, are linked to more than one directory
to make the directories completely independent of each other. In
client-only, server-only, and/or X-less installations, any of the
directories may be removed without affecting the functionality of the
others. Each directory has its own, separate INSTALL file containing
installation instructions, and its own Makefile and/or Imakefile.
The file TO_DO contains some random notes about work to be done.
Contributions are welcome.
Please read the INSTALL file in each source directory before installing.
--
Andreas Gustafsson
Internet: gson@niksula.hut.fi
Snail-mail:
Andreas Gustafsson
Arentikuja 1 D 305
SF-00410 Helsinki
FINLAND.