mandelbrot-scripts

Mandelbrot checksum scripts for benchmarking Python 3.14's free-threaded interpreter

License

This repository and all of its code and data files are licensed under the MIT License.

Background:

These scripts implement a CPU-intensive workload for calculating a checksum for a Mandelbrot set.

Purpose:

These scripts were used to benchmark Python 3.14's new free-threaded interpreter against the classic GIL-enabled build for a CPU-bound workload.

Files:

Several versions of the benchmarking scripts were created to test out a sequential implementation, a multi-processing implementation, and a threaded implementation. A Bash driver script to automate testing and CPU cooldown cycles is also provided.

The respective files are:

• mandelbrot_baseline.py --> sequential implementation
• mandelbrot_multiprocessing.py --> an implementation using Python's standard multiprocessing library
• mandelbrot_threading.py --> an implementation using Python's standard threading library
• run_tests.sh --> a Bash script to automate testing of each Python script against the GIL-enabled Python 3.14 interpreter as well as the free-threaded Python 3.14 interpreter

Running the Code:

1. Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/Roturgo/mandelbrot-scripts.git

2. Change to the mandelbrot-scripts directory

cd mandelbrot-scripts

3. Ensure that your test system has uv installed
4. Install the GIL-enabled and free-threaded interpreters

uv python install cpython-3.14.0
uv python install cpython-3.14.0t

5. (Optional) Verify successful installation

uv python list

6. Sync and activate a python virtual environment to ensure installed python interpreters are in your shell's $PATH

uv sync -U
source .venv/bin/activate

7. Run the Bash script to automate testing and cooldown cycles

bash ./run_tests.sh