Be Extreme!

Sometimes an extreme solution to a problem may be best:

• Buy enough memory to put everything in main memory. A 32-bit PC can address 4 GB of memory, or 200 bytes for every person in Texas.

• Buy a lot of PC's and put part of the data on each PC.

• Use a SSN (9 digits = 1 Gig) as an array index to index a big array stored on disk: no disk accesses to find the disk address. Not all 9-digit numbers are valid SSN's, so some disk will be wasted; but who cares?

• Buy a million PC's if that is what it takes to do your computation.