MandelSpawn, a network Mandelbrot program
Version 0.07
This is MandelSpawn, a network Mandelbrot program. It lets you
calculate pictures of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets in parallel on
several machines.
MandelSpawn is GNU-style free software and is available under the GNU
General Public License, version 1. See the file COPYING for details.
MandelSpawn runs under most versions of Unix. The parallel processing
features require networking support and interactive use requires X11,
but stripped-down versions can be built for more restricted systems.
MandelSpawn includes two different front-end programs: "xms" for
interactive use with X11, and "bms" for noninteractive batch-mode
calculation.
The actual calculations are performed by one or more separate
"compuation server" processes running on different machines (or
different CPUs on the same machine). Typically the 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. The server machines don't need to run X, and different
types of machines can be mixed freely.
MandelSpawn is fault-tolerant in the sense that it can recover from
servers becoming heavily loaded or crashing in the middle of the
computation.
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 0.07 include support for HP 9000/700-series
machines, DEC Alphas, Linux, 24-bit color displays, and non-default X
visuals. The rubberband box can now be manipulated while calculation
is in progress. Several bugs have been fixed.
This release of MandelSpawn has been tested and found to compile and
run without changes on PCs running 386BSD or Linux, DEC Alphas running
OSF/1 V1.2, HP 700-series machines running HP-UX 8.07, Sun SPARCs
running SunOS 4.1.1 with OpenWindows 3, and IBM RS/6000 workstations
running AIX. Previous versions have been successfully run on at least
Sun 3, Sony NEWS, MicroVAX II/4.3BSD, i386/Mach, and MIPS-based
DECstation systems.
MandelSpawn was developed as a student project at the Helsinki
University of Technology Computer Science Laboratory.
MandelSpawn is not 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,
the two programs have been developed completely independently.
New releases of MandelSpawn are usually made available through
anonymous FTP from the following places:
ftp.x.org:/contrib
funic.funet.fi:/pub/X11/contrib
This distribution is divided into four subdirectories:
xms/ The X11-based interactive client program
bms/ The batch-mode client program
mslaved/ The computation server
lib/ Code shared by the above
In client-only, server-only, and/or X-less installations, only the
appropriate directory and the lib directory need to be present.
The file TO_DO contains some random notes about work to be done.
Contributions are welcome.
Please read the INSTALL file carefully before installing.
--
Andreas Gustafsson
Internet: gson@niksula.hut.fi
Snail-mail:
Andreas Gustafsson
Niittykallio 2 F 48
SF-02200 Espoo
