March 27, 2010

Weekend project: compute a 68 gigapixels fractal image

Here is a project I made in order to test HDView SL. I’m not a big fan of the Flash/Silverlight thing, but I have to admit that the Seadragon zooming technique include in Silverlight is pretty neat. Put it in Fullscreen and have fun !

Quick facts:
- The final image size is around 3.2 GB.
- A physical print @ 300 dpi would be around 72.75 feet x 72.75 feet ! Which is equivalent to a 8-story building
- It took around 8 hrs to compute on a 4 cores CPU @ 2.4 Ghz.
- The main loop of the code was done in C.
- The final multithreaded code was done in Python with the help of Parallel Python
- The function wrapper (C -> Python) was done with SWIG and numpy.i.
- I’ll publish the code in the next posts

Comments (11)

  1. April 4, 2010
    Robert Nickens said...

    Wow! This is really nice. Glad to hear that you will share your work. Thank you.

  2. April 4, 2010
    Jon Neal said...

    Is there any chance you could include it somewhere else as non-Silverlight? Not everyone has it installed, after all!

    Thank you

  3. April 4, 2010
    mlaprise said...

    Humm… I tried it with OpenZoom, which is a pretty close alternative in Flash but it was not as smooth.

  4. April 5, 2010
    Paul Allendale said...

    I came here from reddit. Must be cool but no way I’m going to install Silverlight to watch this.

  5. April 5, 2010
    malcolmputer said...

    too bad I can’t install silverlight in the linuxes

  6. April 5, 2010
    Alex in Toronto said...

    The plural for foot is feet. It is an Ablaut plural were it is formed by simply changing the vowel sound of the singular.

    Nice graphic!

  7. April 5, 2010
    Tom Keskumäki said...

    Nice Job Martin. It’s first time i use Silverligh Right.

  8. April 5, 2010
    Mohamed Mansour said...

    Thats impressing, now if someone can do an HTML5 app of this thing.

  9. April 5, 2010
    Jeffrey Martin said...

    This is pretty, but honestly you’re using the wrong tool for the job. I thought there was a hiccup when in fact I had zoomed in all the way.

    By definition, a fractal is quite a simple mathematical equation and thus should be able to be displayed without precomputing or prerending gigabytes (!) of actual image files.

    a friend of mine made a program called Xaos about 15 years ago that in many respects is much more functional than this.

    I don’t mean to disparage your work. You’ve certainly done something more than what I’m capable of :-)

    cheers,
    Jeffrey

  10. April 5, 2010
    mlaprise said...

    Of course … you can make a Mandelbrot set in 10 lines of codes and you can zoom almost infinitely, the only limit is the floating point precision. But that’s not the point here … i just wanted to generate a huge image to test HDView SL.

  11. May 26, 2010
    Abigail Gorman said...

    You have done it once again! Great post.

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