G'day Mario and Merry Christmas,

This is great. I've followed all of the links; I'll delve into them in greater detail over the next few days.

I've been interested in fractals for some decades. Back in the late '90s, I wrote some Perl code to create them: my personal computer didn't have sufficient power to generate these in any useful amount of time; I ran them on a $work machine at ~5pm and got a result the next morning (these were tiny; around 50-100px squares).

About a decade later, now with a personal machine that could produce these in minutes, rather than hours, I set about exploring the basic Mandelbot algorithm. I was surprised with what I was able to achieve. Take a look at the user image on my "home node". It's an APNG which works in every graphical browser I've tried (including those embedded in small mobile devices). Due to size restictions on this site, I had to greatly reduce the number of transitions; however, you'll still be able to see the morphing of a basic Mandelbrot set into a rather fanciful "K" (my initial letter); a Julia set was applied as a last step purely for beautification purposes. All of the images were created using Tk.

The original code for this became huge with a massive (although, not unwanted) feature creep: algorithm selections; output choices, and so on. I hadn't used it in a very long time (over ten years) but, after setting up my latest rig, I dug it out and gave it a try. It still worked perfectly (very please about that) and 800px squares completely rendered in a just a few seconds (as you might imagine, even more pleased about that).

As I'm still on annual leave for the next two weeks, I think I may have a fun project to occupy myself. I'll look into the CUDA demonstrations you indicated, as well as seeing what I can leverage from MCE. A very nice Christmas present — many thanks ++.