Why does Clojure hang after hacing performed my calculations?
- by Thomas
Hi all,
I'm experimenting with filtering through elements in parallel. For each element, I need to perform a distance calculation to see if it is close enough to a target point. Never mind that data structures already exist for doing this, I'm just doing initial experiments for now.
Anyway, I wanted to run some very basic experiments where I generate random vectors and filter them. Here's my implementation that does all of this
(defn pfilter [pred coll]
(map second
(filter first
(pmap (fn [item] [(pred item) item]) coll))))
(defn random-n-vector [n]
(take n (repeatedly rand)))
(defn distance [u v]
(Math/sqrt (reduce + (map #(Math/pow (- %1 %2) 2) u v))))
(defn -main [& args]
(let [[n-str vectors-str threshold-str] args
n (Integer/parseInt n-str)
vectors (Integer/parseInt vectors-str)
threshold (Double/parseDouble threshold-str)
random-vector (partial random-n-vector n)
u (random-vector)]
(time (println n vectors
(count
(pfilter
(fn [v] (< (distance u v) threshold))
(take vectors (repeatedly random-vector))))))))
The code executes and returns what I expect, that is the parameter n (length of vectors), vectors (the number of vectors) and the number of vectors that are closer than a threshold to the target vector. What I don't understand is why the programs hangs for an additional minute before terminating.
Here is the output of a run which demonstrates the error
$ time lein run 10 100000 1.0
[null] 10 100000 12283
[null] "Elapsed time: 3300.856 msecs"
real 1m6.336s
user 0m7.204s
sys 0m1.495s
Any comments on how to filter in parallel in general are also more than welcome, as I haven't yet confirmed that pfilter actually works.