>The so far 12 minutes was an understatement... I let it run for over 90 minutes and 1.6 billion records, whew. I finally had to stop it to do some real work.
>The solution is there but the time to process/resolve is THE problem.

Yes, at that rate it should take almost 85,000,000 minutes or about 150 years (at a quick estimate). But, maybe a large Cray could do it fairly quickly?

Or, you can look for some way to make the code "smarter" - e.g., you can try to eliminate a lot of the loops, somehow, based on the input and results you need. That's what I usually do...