almond-bread

A tool for generating images of the Mandelbrot set, written in Futhark, provided with the necessary utilities to convert Futhark output into an image.

Setup

Dependencies

To compile and use this project, you need:

• Python 3.10 (may change in the future)
• An installation of the Futhark language
• make, e.g. GNU Make (not required - you can easily compile everything manually)

Compilation

Download the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ZedKoS/almond-bread.git

This will create a folder named almond-bread. Let's build the executable:

cd almond-bread/
make

If all went well, you will find a file called mandelbrot in the newly-created bin/ folder

Usage (W.I.P)

At the moment, you will need to go through two steps in order to generate an image (.bmp).

1. In the folder almond-bread/, run the following command, substituting the arguments between <brackets> as needed:

   echo [<a>, <b>, <rx>, <ry>] <width> <height> <iterations> | bin/mandelbrot > <out>
   

   Where:

   • a and b are the components of the complex number in the middle of the image (z = a + bi) e.g. 0, 1 for z = i
   • rx and ry are the extents of the image (e.g. 1e-3, 0.01, etc.). You usually want these to be the same if you are generating a square image without any stretching.
   • width and height are the width and the height of the generated image respectively, in pixels.
     It is recommended that width/height = rx/ry, or else the image will be stretched.
   • iterations tells the program how many steps to take to generate each pixel. A lower iteration count (e.g. 16) will be faster but will not be accurate if the image is zoomed in (i.e. rx and ry are very small)
   • out is where the program will place the generated file, encoded in the Futhark Binary Data Format (BDF). You will need to follow step (2) in order to view it as an image.

2. Locate the generated BDF file. Then, inside almond-bread/, run bdf2bmp.py in the tools/ folder as follows:

   tools/bdf2bmp.py <bdf-file>
   

   Where bdf-file is the path to generated file (e.g. out/myimage).

   The tool will create a file named <bdf-file>.bmp, which can be viewed by many programs.

That's it!

Deleting the binaries

To remove the executable, run:

make clean