concurrency - Concurrent Prime Generator

Question

I'm going through the problems on projecteuler.net to learn how to program in Erlang, and I am having the hardest time creating a prime generator that can create all of the primes below 2 million, in less than a minute. Using the sequential style, I have already written three types of generators, including the Sieve of Eratosthenes, and none of them perform well enough.

I figured a concurrent Sieve would work great, but I'm getting bad_arity messages, and I'm not sure why. Any suggestions on why I have the problem, or how to code it properly?

Here's my code, the commented out sections are where I tried to make things concurrent:

-module(primeserver).
-compile(export_all).

start() ->
    register(primes, spawn(fun() -> loop() end)).

is_prime(N) -> rpc({is_prime,N}).

rpc(Request) ->
    primes ! {self(), Request},
    receive
        {primes, Response} ->
            Response
    end.

loop() ->
    receive
        {From, {is_prime, N}} ->
            if
                N  From ! {primes, false};
                N =:= 2 -> From ! {primes, true};
                N rem 2 =:= 0 -> From ! {primes, false};
                true ->
                    Values = is_not_prime(N),
                    Val = not(lists:member(true, Values)),
                    From ! {primes, Val}
            end,
            loop()
    end.

for(N,N,_,F) -> [F(N)];
for(I,N,S,F) when I + S  [F(I)|for(I+S, N, S, F)];
for(I,N,S,F) when I + S =:= N -> [F(I)|for(I+S, N, S, F)];
for(I,N,S,F) when I + S > N -> [F(I)].

get_list(I, Limit) ->
    if
        I 
            [I*A || A 
            []
    end.

is_not_prime(N) ->
    for(3, N, 2, 
        fun(I) -> 
            List = get_list(I,trunc(N/I)),
            lists:member(N,lists:flatten(List))
        end
        ).

    %%L = for(1,N, fun() -> spawn(fun(I) -> wait(I,N) end) end),
    %%SeedList = [A || A  
    %%      lists:foreach(fun(X) ->
    %%              Pid ! {in_list, X} 
    %%                end, SeedList)
    %%        end, L).

%%wait(I,N) ->
%%  List = [I*A || A  lists:member(X,List)
%%  end.

Answer 1

I wrote an Eratosthenesque concurrent prime sieve using the Go and channels.

Here is the code: http://github.com/aht/gosieve

I blogged about it here: http://blog.onideas.ws/eratosthenes.go

The program can sieve out the first million primes (all primes upto 15,485,863) in about 10 seconds. The sieve is concurrent, but the algorithm is mainly synchronous: there are far too many synchronization points required between goroutines ("actors" -- if you like) and thus they can not roam freely in parallel.