CS240a Realtime/Interactive Fractal Explorer
Fridrik H. Asmundsson
Christopher Grzegorczyk
Kyo Lee
Project Information [progress report 1]
  • Overview
    • A Realtime/Interactive Fractal Explorer with an OpenGL interface and back end computation using MPI
  • Problem
    • Generally, a fractal has properties which inherently prohibit digitization.  That is, assigning a pixel of a fractal image to be some value contradicts the property that fractals are invariant to scaling.  We can think of a fractal as a series of 2D images where the region of interest rendered changes over time. As a result, we are not trapped into assigning a pixel, which corresponds to some interval in the plane, with a single ,likely, incorrect value. Presuming that the region of interest changes provides for an arbitrary resolution over time.  
    • If we presume to present an interactive image of a fractal then we must compute many regions of interest.  Which points in the plane are meaningful to iterate over?  That is, which points will map to a pixel value in some rendered image?  Can the values from previous renderings be reused?  How many iterations are needed?  How should this be parallelized?
  • Interactivity
    • Zooming in/out
      • change of resolution
      • need to recompute the entire image
      • will require precomputation
    • Navigation
      • translation in x and/or y plane
      • slide pixels in rendered image
      • compute borders
  • Front end
    • OpenGL GUI for displaying rendered image
    • Interacts with MPI 
      • requests data for current region of interest
      • data transfered via LAN ( bandwidth bottleneck? )
    • Assumes 1024x1024 size
    • User selects the region of interest interactively
  • Back end
    • parallel fractal image generation
    • recieves region of interest from OpenGL
    • renders requested frame
    • preemptively renders future frames
    • additive increase, exponential decrease of iteration number ( like TCP )