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Many primes, very fast. Python sieve using primesieve.

pyprimesieve

Many primes, very fast. Uses primesieve_.

primesieve, one of the fastest (if not the fastest) prime sieve implementaions available, is actively maintained by Kim Walisch.

It uses a segmented sieve of Eratosthenes with wheel factorization for a complexity of O(nloglogn) operations.

Performance

Regarding primesieve for C++:

primesieve generates the first 50,847,534 primes up to 10^9 in just 0.4 seconds on a single core of an Intel Core
i7-920 2.66GHz, this is about 50 times faster than an ordinary C/C++ sieve of Eratosthenes implementation and about
10,000 times faster than trial-division. primesieve outperforms [Kim's] older ecprime_ (fastest from 2002 to 2010) by
about 30 percent and also substantially outperforms primegen_ the fastest sieve of Atkin implementation on the
web.

For comparison, on an Intel Core i7 2GHz, pyprimesieve populates an entire Python list of the first 50,847,534 primes in 1.40 seconds. It's expected that a Python implementation would be slower than C++ but, surprisingly, by only one second.

pyprimesieve outperforms all of the fastest prime sieving implementations for Python.

Time (ms) to generate the all primes below one million and iterate over them in Python:

=================== ============= algorithm time


pyprimesieve 2.79903411865 primesfrom2to 13.1568908691 primesfrom3to 13.5800838470 ambi_sieve 16.1600112915 rwh_primes2 38.7749671936 rwh_primes1 48.5658645630 rwh_primes 52.0040988922 sieve_wheel_30 59.3869686127 sieveOfEratosthenes 59.4990253448 ambi_sieve_plain 161.740064621 sieveOfAtkin 232.724905014 sundaram3 251.194953918 =================== =============

It can be seen here that pyprimesieve is 4.7 times faster than the fastest Python alternative using Numpy and 13.85 times faster than the fastest pure Python sieve.

All benchmark scripts and algorithms are available for reproduction. Prime sieve algorithm implementations were taken from this discussion on SO_.

Functions

primes(n): List of prime numbers up to n.

primes(start, n): List of prime numbers from start up to n.

primes_sum(n): The summation of prime numbers up to n. The optimal number of threads will be determined for the given number and system.

primes_sum(start, n): The summation of prime numbers from start up to n. The optimal number of threads will be determined for the given numbers and system.

primes_nth(n): The nth prime number.

factorize(n): List of tuples in the form of (prime, power) for the prime factorization of n.

Installation

.. code-block:: bash

pip install pyprimesieve

NOTE: To enable the parallelized version of prime summation, you must use a compiler that supports OpenMP. You may need to pass a valid compiler as an environment variable.

Testing

After installation, you can make sure everything is working by running the following inside the project root folder,

.. code-block:: bash

python tests

License

"Modified BSD License". See LICENSE for details. Copyright Jared Suttles, 2015.

.. _primesieve: https://github.com/kimwalisch/primesieve .. _ecprime: http://primzahlen.de/referenten/Kim_Walisch/index2.htm .. _primegen: http://cr.yp.to/primegen.html .. _this discussion on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068372/fastest-way-to-list-all-primes-below-n-in-python