endlos - A multithreaded fractal generator in Java

[lycium]

a much better way to do your multithreaded processing is to have N worker threads do interleaved scanlines. there's plenty of parallelism to go around without resorting to splitting threaded work at the subpixel (!!) level; futhermore, unless there are extremely regular correlations in the image (causing different execution times) it should result in good (even) workload distribution. the threads do not share data at all and write to independent memory regions...

why on earth did you split it at the aa level?! this forces a square number of threads unless you get funky with precomputed antialiasing patterns (having toroidal symmetry), and since cpu cores come in powers of two usually that's 1, 4, 16, 64, etc., and each thread's results must then be gathered and combined, written again, ...

edit: i see the threading isn't relaeted to antialiasing at all, but the final image dimensions. interleaved threading will provide much better load balancing than blocked will, and when you add antialiasing into the mix (long render times...) it'll make a significant difference.

[dentaku2]

endlos V 0.20.0

Code:

2007-03-05 : Version 0.20.0 - threads & color functions
---------------------------

CHANGED:
  1. Coloring function "Function" renamed to "Function1". Migration: in you fractal XML
     files, rename value of <colorMode>: 
     
     <colorMode>Function</colorMode>   to   <colorMode>Function1</colorMode>
     
  2. Misc. GUI changes.
  3. Thread count is not squared anymore. The image is now tiled into the exact number
     of threads. This leads to misc image tiling depending on the possible tile factors.

FIXED:
  1. Randomize colors didn't work for deep iterations.
  2. Demo fractal settings were reused so that once a demo fractal was changed,
     the new fractal hasen't used it's saved settings but the last changed.

NEW:
  1. Cycle through color maps with mouse wheel when mouse pointer is over color
     maps list.
  2. Eighteen new coloring functions.
  3. New post processing effects 'posterize', 'threshold', 'rotate'.

[dentaku2]

Code:

2007-03-30 : Version 1.0.0 - 2D fractals
--------------------------

CHANGED:
  1. Default number of threads is number of (virtual) processors. On a dual core or a
     pentium with hyper threading this will be 2. This will use the theoretical optimal
     number of threads by default.
  2. Pause button replaced by CPU usage slider for fine grained system load.
     (0% same as former pause.)