POSIX Threads Project
About the project
It is a program that examines the amount of prime numbers in a large array of numbers. The parent creates the needed child processes and performs the necessary initializations. The parent then shows how many prime numbers were identified in the array.
- Coded in C
- Gedit to code
- Terminal to test and run my code
Concepts utilized in the project
- PThreads
- Fork
Approach
The parent creates n processes, where n is the number of processing cores in the machine. Each child process spawns n/2 pthreads to carry out the processing. The program adapts to the hardware it is utilizing, and instead of being a constant or hard-coded value, n is generated from the operating system.
By default the code sets the array size to 10,000 this can be changed when the code is run (check the section below) I took the usual approach of assigning the threads to each process using the for-loop iteration as done in the labs, however, as for the rest I took the approach of saving the count of prime-numbers from each process to a file then summed up the numbers in the end to display the total count, then I deleted the file.
To compile the code
write this in the terminal from the current dir: gcc -pthread main.c
To run the compiled executable file:
- with the default array size (10K):
./a.out - with custom array size add size after:
./a.out [size]| Example:./a.out 100