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

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about what to use for a simple demonstration of my AsynQueue asynchronous task queuing library for Python, now that I've been working on it again after a seven-year hiatus. Computation of the Mandelbrot set was listed somewhere as an "embarrassingly parallel" algorithm, and the simplicity was appealing: z=z²+c. This should be a quick one, I thought.

Well, you can guess how that turned out. Worlds within worlds! Seahorses and swirls and spirals and minibrots galore. This thing was fascinating. And then there were the wonderful challenges of computational optimization, and putting my software to work to most effectively dispatch the number crunching to the cores of my multicore CPU.

The result is online for you to play around with if you like, at mcm.edsuom.com. Just click on the image to have my quad-core virtual private server compute another one centered on that spot, zoomed in 5x. And on and on it can go, to the limits of the machine's double-precision floats.