We have a command line exe that takes input from a text file and produces an output text file. It is used for complex industrial simulations.
The source code for this exe is long gone. Now it was easy enough to create a .NET wrapper which controls the execution of this exe and links in with an external app via a web service.
Unfortunetely a new requirement is to run optimization over this black box model. Now there are various methods to perform black box optimization but they all require calling the executable thousands (millions?) of times. Its obvious that the creation and parsing of disk based text files is the bottleneck of the simulation process.
Is there anyway I can trick this executable into not writing to a physical disk? If we were on Unix I suppose pipes would do the trick, but our deployment server is Windows Server 03.
It just occurred to me that a ramdrive might solve this problem, but I havent played with one of those since MS-DOS 6. Any commercial products worth looking at? Does anyone have any other ideas for emulating a physical drive through code? We are on .NET 3.5.
RAMDisk with freeware version
Microsoft version
How-to