The Power of Supercomputing Applied to Fractal Image Generation

This project looks into how parallelism benefits the runtime of generating large fractal images. First, it explains what the Julia and Mandelbrot Sets are, who discovered them, and how they are calculated. Following that is an introduction to supercomputers, parallel computing, and Cal Poly Humboldt’s very own supercomputer. Once groundwork is laid, I explain my process of adapting a fractal image generation program from serial computing to different levels of parallelism. After that, is an analysis of the effects of levels of parallelism on the runtime of large fractal image generation. This paper concludes with a reflection on the project as a whole, as well as a discussion of potential impacts