Write a program to find 100 largest numbers out of an array of 1 billion numbers

Question

I recently attended an interview where I was asked \"write a program to find 100 largest numbers out of an array of 1 billion numbers.\"

I was only able to give a br

Answer 1

Possible improvements.

If the file contains 1 billions number, reading it could be really long...

To improve this working you can :

• Split the file into n parts, Create n threads, make n threads look each for the 100 biggest numbers in their part of the file (using the priority queue), and finally get the 100 biggest numbers of all threads output.
• Use a cluster to do a such task, with a solution like hadoop. Here you can split the file even more and have the output quicker for a 1 billion (or a 10^12) numbers file.