Distributed Mandelbrot

This app demonstrates sharing jobs on mobile devices using Wi-Fi Direct. This is a prototype developed as a proof-of-concept for the Honeybee work stealing model for my PhD dissertation, La Trobe University, Australia. In this app, we generate the Mandelbrot set, with the aid of multiple mobile devices. One device initiates the task by starting program execution, while also looking for other mobile 'worker' resources. The worker devices interested in taking on work, should also run the program. Once the initiating device discovers the worker devices, it can connect to them, and offload some work. The initiating device will display the generated fractal upon task completion.

This app is meant to be an experimenting tool to test how work is distributed among heterogenous mobile devices, and show the amounts of performance gain that can be achieved by job sharing. This prototype supports random disconnections, and workers can be disconnected during program execution to test the fault-tolerance mechanisms.

Please ensure that the worker devices and the initiating device support Wi-Fi Direct. For best results, pair the devices via Wi-Fi Direct, and connect the initiating device to each worker such that a p2p group is formed, prior to program execution. Disconnect the p2p group before running the program. This will help smooth any connection issues that can occur with Wi-Fi Direct group formation.