END OF AN ERA, FRACTALFORUMS.COM IS CONTINUED ON FRACTALFORUMS.ORG

I am currently exploring the possibility to create a BOINC project to render fractal on a very large scale (and exploring fractal that could take many months or year of cpu-time to render, or animation).
The documentation is here : http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ProjectMain

My main goal is to work on buddhabrot rendering. But (if it works) we could do something more "universal" to render many kind of fractal with many kind of parameters.

Of course, to reach a greater popularity (and get much more client) the project should create awesome 3D (or 4,5, many-dimension) Fractal like the very popular mandelbulb.
Boinc also recognize & handle GPU computing too.

I think i can take care of the server-side stuff (100% sure for the sysadmin (being a sysadmin myself), not sure yet for the software part of the server).
and probably the client side stuff for buddhabroth rendering. For something more "universal" (and/or 3D) i probably can't.

One of my idea to create a "universal" fractal boinc client could be to simply use LUA.

This was my little brainstoring. It's your turn now

I use Monte-carlo method to compute mandelbrot.

Do a few millions of time :
1) choose random complex point
2) iterate and draw orbit
3) goto 1

a) each client could do that "1 millions time" processing.
b) the server retrieve thousands of "1 million orbit" map, add all maps together, normalize, render a single image.
c)
d) profit !

Sounds interesting, so please keep us informed as to your progress with this.   
 

Awesome idea! How is it progressing?

Did anything ever come of this project? 
There's now an interesting bitcoin clone for BOINC called gridcoins that lets you split your cpu between BOINC and mining for gridcoins, so you can get paid (in gridcoins) for the CPU time you contribute.
A similar system could be really interesting for fractal rendering - you could lease your idle GPU's to people on BOINC or a similar network and get paid for it .