mdj wrote:
> On Feb 1, 12:12 pm, "Michael J. Mahon"  wrote:
> 
>>> I remember typing in one example that rendered the Mandelbrot set in
>>> hires, then waiting the 5-6 hours for it to render, just because of
>>> found it ingenious :-)
>> A direct evaluation of the Mandelbrot set at hires takes about seven
>> hours whether it's a one-liner or not.  ;-)  I use it as a demonstration
>> of "embarrassing parallelism" for the AppleCrate--in
fact, I used it at
>> KansasFest (though the demo was interrupted by my zapping it with ESD!).
> 
> Yikes! I hope the zap only interrupted the network or reset a host;
> I'd not enjoy the job of replacing a shift register on slave 10 :-)

Nor would I!  ;-)

The Apple II boards are remarkably robust, so all the transient did was
cause a wild branch into the weeds.  A reboot restored it to health. ;-)

>> With 16 processors running it, and "jobs" assigned by
line number, it
>> get linear speedup, and runs in about 26 minutes--so the plan was that
>> it would finish by around the middle of my talk.  ;-)
> 
> Fun to watch it render too, I bet!

Yes, I first assigned the lines in order, so, even though they take
different lengths of time to compute, the result image tended to build
linearly from top to bottom.  So I decided to shuffle the lines in the
work queue to cause the image to fill in random order--making the image
_gestalt_ pretty clear after less than half the lines have been 
completed.  There's a bit of drama as only a few lines remain, with a
sort of "horse race" to see which machines will finish first.  ;-)

-michael

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