I have written a Forth Mandelbrot fractal plotter, and as much as a technical exercise as anything else I would like to try to speed it up with some parallel processing.
For the time being I would be happy if I could just use both of my cores (have one core do one half of the image and the other the other half).
I have noticed that Windows XP will quite happily manage two instances of Gforth and try use as much processor capacity as possible, so running two processes could be a start. However I am not sure if they can share memory, or if the开发者_C百科y can both write to a file at the same time (or how to tell one process to start writing at x bytes from the start of the file).
In summary, how can I do parallel processing using Gforth on Windows XP?
You could have each program do a grid of pixels rather than a single pixel, and then recombine them in the end.
AFAIK, pixels in Mandelbrot sets are independent of each other (someone correct me if I am wrong), however the computation of each of them is non-deterministic, making it a hard problem to properly parallelize, without having some kind of central dispatch thread (then again you run into potential problems with contention).
See GForth Pipes.
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