title: What hardware is required to run this program?
body: <p>My main goal here is to get the results from this program for my research programs, so even if someone has a ready database of such a permutation set I could download, it would be helpful to my quest here.</p>
  
  <p>That said, if I could generate it myself, it would be an advantage to what I'm doing.</p>
  
  <p>Program:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import itertools
  set=['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l']
  perm=list(itertools.permutations(set, 12))
  print perm
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem I'm running into is a hardware issue.</p>
  
  <p>My hardware specifications are the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>imac 27in late 2012
  Mac OSX Mountain Lion
  8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
  Intel 3.4GHz i7
  1TB HD with a bit more than 50% free space.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The message I get when I try to run the program is that there is not enough memory on the startup disk to keep the program open and it asks me to force quit the program. It freezes and then I have to fix my permissions after a hard restart to get everything running smooth again, so:</p>
  
  <p>I DO NOT RECOMMEND RUNNING THIS PROGRAM, AS IS, TO TEST IT, unless you already know your system can handle it.</p>
  
  <p>But, my estimation is that this program outputs a list at (I think) size 12! which is ungodly large... over 500,000,000 permutations (the actual size of the output might be less than 12!, but it is way larger than just an exponential).</p>
  
  <p>So, how can I get this data? Do I need a new system? If so, how much space or RAM do I need?</p>
  
  <p>Or, is there some trick I can use to split the program up into manageable chunks?</p>