# Fractal Animation Using OpenCL

In this post I explain how I created animated videos of fractal transformations, specifically transformations of the Julia Set. The post explores three different implementations of the program:

• Serial computation in Python
• Parallel frame computation in C++
• Parallel pixel computation in C++ using the OpenCL framework

Each implementation performs the same overall task of creating transformation animations, yet each does so in a very different way.

In the first half of this post I cover the basic operations for the task, independent of implementation. Later, I explain each implementation and how each affects the run time of the program.

## Complex Quadratic Polynomial Representation

Computing Julia Sets is simple using the complex quadratic polynomial representation. The equation

simplifies the chaotic Julia Set into a simple polynomial which is easy to work with in a program. I set each element of a matrix to a complex $z$, relative to the position of the element in the matrix. I also define complex $c$. Variable $c$ changes the form of the Julia set, which is explained later in the post. For each element in a matrix with a now-known $z$ and $c$, the program applies the above equation until reaching a sufficient limit on the magnitude of $z$ (or reaching the color white).

The following algorithm applies the copmlex quadratic polynomial representation of the Julia Set in python and is the one I used for every version of the program I wrote.

The function above generates a size x size matrix in which each element contains a value between 1 and 255. This value represents the color assigned at that element.

## Color Mapping

In a grayscale image, black is assigned to 255 and white is assigned to 0. In multicolored frames, I applied a custom colormap to the matrix. This would map every grayscale value in the matrix to an RGB color, depending on an input image containing a gradient of colors. Here is a visualization:

## Animation

Creating animations of the fractal images simply requires changing the parameters given to the Julia Set algorithm explained earlier in the post. There are six parameters and each are explained below.

size defines the dimensions of the matrix/image. If size = 50, the dimensions are set to 50 rows and 50 columns.

zoom defines the boundaries of complex $z$ in the earlier algorithm. As the boundaries get closer (zoom gets smaller), the matrix will be filled with a smaller section of $z$ values, thus zooming in on the image.

center_re and center_im define the center point of the $z$ values. In the very center of each matrix, complex $z$ is set to center_re $+$ $i$ $\times$ center_im. These values are used in conjunction with zoom to define the $z$ values across the matrix. In the context of the rendered frames in animation, these two parameters shift the image left/right and up/down, depending on the sign and magnitude of each variable.

c_re and c_im are user-set and directly affect what the Julia Set will look like. Incrementing/decrementing c_re or c_im (or both) defines how the fractal transforms throughout the frames of an animation.

I have provided a few examples of arguments and their respective Julia Set renderings at the bottom of this post. The color maps used in the examples can be found here.

Creating sequential frames of fractal images required defining two additional constants at the beginning of the program: c_re_step and c_im_step. The values of these variables are added respectively to c_re and c_im for each frame of the video.

Once each frame is computed, a color map is applied and the image is exported to storage. I found that the fastest way to export the image was using a raw image format like ppm, as no encoding is required. At the end of the program, I use ffmpeg to take sequential images and create an MP4 video. The exact command I used is below, but
this changes depending on where files are exported and how they are named.

\$ ffmpeg -f image2 -r 60 -i tmp/F%04d.ppm -vcodec mpeg4 -q:v 1 -y out.mp4


This command takes all images in the ./tmp/ directory named F0001.ppm, F0002.ppm, etc. and encodes them sequentially into an mpeg4 video at 60 frames per second with video quality set to the maximum.

## Programming models

As explained earlier, I implemented the program using three different models:

• Serial computation in Python
• Parallel frame computation in C++
• Parallel pixel computation in C++ using the OpenCL framework

These were implemented to speed up the process of creating the videos. When some high-resolution videos were taking upwards of an hour to compute, I decided to re-write the program. Summaries of each model are below:

## Serial

The serial model is simple. It requires a for-loop which iterates through each frame number and computes a Julia Set for that frame using the appropriate adjusted c_re and c_im values. A diagram of its execution is below.

The downside to the serial implementation is speed. The program uses one process and zero child threads. It computes each pixel of each frame sequentially, applies a color map to the entire frame, exports the frame to the disk, and then moves on to the next frame when finished. There is no parallelization whatsoever, and the program can take hours to output a video depending on the size and parameters.

## Parallel frames

The parallel frames model is similar to the serial model, with one significant difference. The entire sequence of frames is divided up into n groups, where n is a user-set constant of the number of child processes or threads to which the load is distributed. The diagram below shows how the execution of this model happens.

The downside to the parallel frames implementation is that it still carries a similar weakness to the serial model. The video is created on a per-frame basis, so in a process’s/thread’s given sequence of frames, no two can be computed at the same time. It also means that a non-optimal amount of context switches take place, as each frame is written to the disk in between the termination of its computation and the start of the next frame’s computation.

## Parallel pixels (OpenCL)

The parallel pixels model uses the OpenCL framework to compute sequential Julia Sets. The source code for the entire program can be found here on my Github. Instead of parallelizing the execution on the frame level, it instead treats every element of the Julia set (every pixel of the image) as a separate operation. In OpenCL, this kind of elementary computation can be performed in something called a kernel. A kernel can be queued onto an OpenCL-compatible device like a multicore processor or modern GPU. To differentiate between frames, I used an NDRange (N-Dimensional Range) kernel, shown in the diagram below (from OpenCL 1.2 Specification).

In the case of Julia Set computation, the NDRange kernel execution model is easy to visualize. Each element of the set can be computed independently once complex $z$ is known based on the position of the element. In this case, each work-group shown in the diagram only contains one work-item. Both $G_y$ and $G_x$ are set to size, and each element of the Julia Set is computed in a single work-item.

Using this model, I created NDRange kernels for each frame of the animation and then enqueued them for execution on the OpenCL device. Before enqueueing them, OpenCL buffers are created for the range of $z$ values as well as the color map used for the set. This speeds up execution because the OpenCL device can read/write from its own memory faster than the memory of the host system. Instead of applying the color map after an entire frame is computed, it is applied during the computation of each element of the Julia Set. These operations can be seen in the main kernel code of my program:

Note that in OpenCL’s kernel language, complex numbers are not built-in. Type Complex is defined earlier in the kernel source code as a double2, a 2-dimensional vector double defined in the language. Both c_add and c_multiply are implementations of complex number arithmetic.

I also chose to not write to the disk after each frame’s computation to reduce the number of context switches in the operating system in this model. Instead, every frame is kept in OpenCL buffers until all frames are finished. Afterward, the data is moved to host memory and subsequently written to the host disk in raw image format.

## Speed Comparison

In order to verify that there is a difference in speed for each of the programming models I used, I tested each of them using several different animations at different image resultions. The render times come from my Thinkpad laptop equipped with an Intel i7-4600U CPU @ 2.10GHz and no dedicated GPU. This plot represents the render time of a 300-frame animation at different resolutions.

Notice the logarithmic scale of the y-axis. Render times were so poor on the serial model that I had to change the axis scale in order to even show the OpenCL parallel pixels running times. At the 500x500 pixel resolution, the serial program rendered a video in an average 1044.09 seconds (over 17 minutes). At the same resolution, the parallel frames program took an average of 140.39 seconds (2 minutes and 20 seconds) and the parallel pixels program using the OpenCL framework rendered the same video in only 7.32 seconds.

## Conclusion

When I started working on making fractal animations using Python, I had no idea my program was so slow. I accepted that it could take hours to render some videos. Over the course of this experiment I realized what kind of difference parallelization can make in computation. I also learned that there is a right and wrong way to implement parallelization. The parallel frame and parallel pixel models both use parallel programming, but one is significatly faster than the other. Between context switches, buffer versus host memory, and choosing an elementary operation, it is clear that the implementation used to execute an algorithm can make an enormous difference in runtime. I hope to apply this in more practical uses in the future.

If you would like to check out the source code for my OpenCL program, you can find it on my Github. If you find a flaw in my program, feel free to open an issue (or fork the repo and help me fix it!).

If you would like to make your own animations, I have provided a few examples of Julia Set frames to help you get started.

## Examples

A

• size = 400
• center_re = 0.0
• center_im = 0.0
• zoom = 1.0
• c_re = 0.0
• c_im = 0.64
• color map: brg.jpg

B

• size = 400
• center_re = 0.49
• center_im = 0.1
• zoom = 0.19
• c_re = 0.26
• c_im = 0.001
• color map: gnuplut.jpg

C

• size = 400
• center_re = 0.46
• center_im = 0.0
• zoom = 0.24
• c_re = 0.26
• c_im = 0.0
• color map: ocean.jpg

D

• size = 400
• center_re = 0.2
• center_im = 0.4
• zoom = 0.2
• c_re = 0.0
• c_im = 0.642
• color map: gist_rainbow.jpg