Optimizing Prime Number Generation: Creating a High-Performance C Program for 32-Bit Primes
By
hnlyman
Hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, baked to perfection. Worth every minute at the bakery.
Summary
This article documents the author's technical journey to create an optimized C program for Linux that generates all prime numbers that fit within a 32-bit unsigned integer range as quickly as possible. The program outputs primes to a binary file with specific formatting requirements, including little-endian byte ordering and a verifiable SHA-256 hash. The article appears to be part one of a series focused on performance optimization and algorithmic implementation for prime number generation.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledThis article documents my quest to write a C program targeting Linux that generates all prime numbers that fit in a 32-bit unsigned int (uint32_t) as quickly as possible.
In particular, the program should write all 32-bit primes to a file (which, in all my implementations, is called PRIMES) in binary, so that every 4 bytes of the file stores one primes number, with the bytes ordered in a little-endian fashion.
In hex, the file should start out: 02 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 05 00 00 00 07 00 00 00, and the correct SHA-256 hash for
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