Re: Searching for Fastest Way to Input a File
- Posted by mindwalker May 15, 2014
- 2697 views
It's actually a limit of sequences. After all, 1073741823 should be enough sequence elements for everyone!
The Milky Way contains 100–400 billion stars. I guess one could make 100-400 separate sequences assuming this limit is per sequence and not an overall sequence element limit per program.
Yeah, everyone is thinking database not sequence. But to compute the net gravitational effect of the rest of the galaxy on an individual star one needs all the masses and relative coordinates of every star. And if one was trying to simulate the motion of the galaxy they would need to compute the gravitational effect on every star. Imagine the physical i/o required if one relied on a database to read this information in for each star's computation. Then repeat over and over again.
Although I enjoyed playing with the DOS version of Astro from the archive simulating up to 2500 masses at a time, I'm not planning to simulate the Milky Way. Besides there would be other computing power problems to overcome. My point is there are imaginable applications where this sequence size limitation could make the task even more difficult.
