Draw Mandelbrot using SIMD

Question

I'm looking to optimise generating buddhabrots and to do so I read about SIMD and parallel computing. Is it possible to use this to speed up the generation of my buddhabrots. I'm programming in C

Answer 1

Yes, Buddhabrot generation can be easily parallelized. The key is to separate the computation from the rendering. The computation begins with a 2D array of counters, one per pixel, initialized to all zeros. A processor can then increment those counters while computing random trajectories. You can parallelize this in SIMD fashion by having multiple processors each doing this starting with different random seeds and periodically dumping those arrays into files. When you think they may have done this enough for a satisfying result, you simply gather all those files and create a master array that contains the sums of all the others. Only then would you perform histogram equalization on the final array and render the result by assigning colors to each range of values in the histogram. If you find that the result is not "cooked" to your satisfaction, you can simply continue the calculations or create more files to be summed and rendered.

Answer 2

Indeed many have worked on this. This an example that works pretty well. There are others.