Exploring ideas with Python
This post continues my investigation into running standard Python on multiple cores using the concurrent.futures module. This time, I will be taking some image processing code from a previous post on the transverse Mercator transform and attempting to scale it to multiple CPUs.
The Sieve of Eratosthenes is a beautifully elegant way of finding all the prime numbers up to any limit. The goal of this post is to implement the algorithm as efficiently as possible in standard Python 3.5, without resorting to importing any modules, or to running it on faster hardware.
Eratosthenes was a Greek scholar who lived in Alexandria (276BC to 194BC) in the so-called Hellenistic period. He was working about a century after Alexander, and about a century before the Romans arrived to impose their cultural desert and call it peace. And then do nothing with the body of knowledge they discovered. Literally. For over 1,600 years, if you count Constantinople. Not a damn thing.
So much for overly religious, centralised, bureaucratic superstates, obsessed with conquest. But I digress.