The Mandelbrot set is a fractal curve. On one level it is very simple, while on another it is highly complex. The image of the Mandelbrot set was poularized with the rise of chaos theory in the 1990s, as well as posters on an uncountable number of college dorm rooms. Arriving at the Mandelbrot set requires a great amount of computational power. The Computron, a parallel computer made with Raspberry Pi Picos, has the power to compute the Mandelbrot set. Here’s more from Ryan Kolm and Ignacio De Jesus Romo Jimenez:
For our final project, we built Computron, a parallel computer consisting of Raspberry Pi Picos that communicate over a I2C bus. To demonstrate the power of parallel computation among these devices, the Mandelbrot set is computed across Picos. Every Pico computes a portion of the set, while one is also responsible for projecting the set onto a VGA monitor. This projection unit is special, in that it is the only peripheral device on the I2C bus while every other Pico is an I2C controller. We were able to configure the projection unit to dynamically recognize the number of controllers on the network prior to computation, and to distribute work accordingly without a user informing the network directly. In the end, with eight Picos connected together we were able to achieve about a four-times speedup in computation of the Mandelbrot set compared to computation on a single Pico.
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