Date   : Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:38:02 +0100
From   : tom@... (Tom Seddon)
Subject: BBC mandelbrot generator (preview)

Steven Flintham:
> On 18 April 2010 14:38, Tom Seddon <tom@...> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the link. I'd never seen that one before. It's... much faster
>> than I was expecting :)
>>
>> (Even after running it in its most straightforward calculation mode,
>> it's
>> about twice as fast as mine! I'm going to have to work out what it's
>> doing
>> now!)
>>
>
> I don't know much about second processors, but I wonder if it would be
> feasible to write a version which actually splits the Mandelbrot
> calculations between the two CPUs? My gut feeling is that just handling
> the
> plotting can't really be taking up that much of the host processor's time.

This sort of parallel processing is my intention, and the reason I started
writing my program in the first place was just to see how well it works.
(I'm intending to use the work pool technique. I don't think it should be
too complicated, just needs a bit of memory. This should provide fair
parallelism fairly automatically, even if the two CPUs differ in speed.)

It looks like this should be perfectly possible (and perfectly safe), even
if it doesn't seem to be quite what the Tube was designed for exactly.
I've yet to code it up, though. I'm kind of putting it off, in truth, as
I'm sure it's going to be a pain to debug :)

--Tom