The Mandelbulb is a 3D Version of the Mandelbrot fractal. I have written my own renderer for this a little while back. I don't think the source is of much interest, as you can find better implementations around.

If that caught your interest you can find more information and pictures of the Mandelbulb on the website of Daniel White.

Yesterday, I messed up my system by trying to install a NVIDIA beta driver in order to use opencl. Today I tried again with more success. Here is how I did it:

1. Download the driver from the NVIDIA website
2. Open the hardware driver manager of Ubuntu (Sytem/Administration/Hardware Drivers)
3. Select the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (the active one) and click remove
4. Log out
5. Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to the console
6. Login with your username and password
7. sudo stop gdm
8. chmod +x ./nvdrivers_*.run
9. sudo ./nvdrivers_*.run
10. sudo init 6
11. Enjoy OpenCL goodness

A WORD OF WARNING don't try this unless you understand all the steps involved and know how to recover your system in case something goes wrong!

Stay tuned for some nice opencl experiment.