Too Fast
This is the first time that my computer has ever been too fast for me!
I needed to come up with a good programming problem that would be easily parallelizable. So, I fell back on the old standard, the Mandelbrot set. I got the single-threaded version working yesterday, and much to my dismay, it was really fast. What’s the point in parallelizing a fast program?
Nonetheless, I love the Mandelbrot set. Here are some pictures I generated:
Most of these images only took a few seconds to generate. Back in 1995 when I wrote my first Mandelbrot viewer in CS3, it took several minutes to generate images this large. The parallelized version would still take 30-45 seconds.
So, since this is no longer challenging enough for modern computers, I’ll have to find something else. Volumetric rendering sounds pretty good…