/MandelbrotExplorer

Interactive Mandelbrot set explorer using CUDA acceleration and VTK for graphics/interaction

Primary LanguageCudaGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

This is a Mandelbrot set explorer written in CUDA and using VTK for graphics and mouse interactions. The code is targeted to run on my "personal supercomputer", which is a Dell Precision 7810 tower with an Nvidia Tesla K80 GPGPU as the compute engine.

This Mandelbrot explorer iterates the logistic map,

$$ x_{n+1} = \lambda x_n (1 - x_n) $$

instead of the usual Mandelbrot map

$$ z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + C $$

My explorer shows the escape time vs the parameter $\lambda$ in the complex plane. I take the sqrt() of the escape times prior to plotting and also fiddle with the color mapping in order to get pretty images. Some screenshots are below.

To run the explorer, just type "Mandelbrot" at the command line. The middle mouse button pans the image and the mouse wheel will zoom in and out. The other mouse buttons are disabled. To quit the program just hit the 'q' key.

The following command line args are optional:

-N Number of iterations to use. Default is 8, but higher numbers (in the thousands) produce better Mandelbrot sets.

These are useful if you want to start the program displaying a particular area in the complex plane:

-x Starting x
-y Starting y
-w Starting width to display
-h Starting height to display

To build the program from scratch:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
./Mandelbrot

Ignore any warnings about thrust you get.

Stuart Brorson, July 2022.