Wilsonville, Oregon 9-Dec-1998

This is my Fractal Generator.

There is a client (fractal.exe) and various servers (the other executables). The application should exploit machines with multiple CPUs and other machines in the network via DCOM. Provided you install the servers and the proxy DLL (mandelps.dll) on these machines and of course also on your machine.

To install a server type e.g.

mandel.exe /regserver

To install the proxy DLL type

regsvr32 mandelps.dll

Or just start the provided

to register the servers and proxy DLL on your system.

In the future there may be other servers providing other iteration mechanism.

You may have to setup your DCOM configuration using the utility dcomcnfg. Using this utility one can also setup the configuration for a single server (julia, mandel, mandel4dim).

I did not test this on a network, since I only have a single machine at home. I would appreciate, if somebody gives me some information on whether it does work and what has to be configured in which way so that I can include it here.

To use other machines, simply pass the names of these machines at the commandline to fractal.exe.

The servers are running with idle priority -- this means, that they only get CPU time if there is no process with normal priority which currently needs CPU time. Thus installing these servers and the usage of these servers by others does not degrade the responsiveness of your system as long as you're not playing around with process or thread priorities. Most applications don't exploit idle priority, since it is erroneously considered as lowering performance.

Use this software on your own risk! I cannot accept any responsibility for damages created directly or indirectly by the usage of this software.

Peter Foelsche