How to load file with 500M into noncontiguous memory and visit them

Question

My data file consist of  a serial of 2d images. Each image is 174*130*2 butes and the total images in the file is up to 11000, which takes almost 500M bytes. I hope to load them into memory in one turn since I need to visit either image many times in random order during the data processing. When I load them into one big 3d array, the error of "out of memory" happended frequenctly.
First I tried to use QUEUE to load big chunk of data into noncontiguous memory. Queue structure is a good way to load and unload data into noncontiguous memory. But it dosn't fit here since I may need to visit any of the all the images at anytime. And it is not pratical if I dequeue one image and enqueue it into the opposite end, since the image visited may be not in sequential order.
Another choice is to put the whole file into multiple small arrays. In my case, I may load the data file into 11000 small 2d arrays and each array holds the data of one image. But I don't know how to visit these 2d array and I didn't get any cues in the posters here.
Any suggestion?
PC with 4G physical memory, Labview 7.1 and Win XP.
Thanks.

Answer 1

I'll try to get the ball rolling here -- hopefully there's some better ideas than mine out there.
1. I've never used IMAQ, but I suspect that it offers more efficient methods than stuff I dream up in standard LabVIEW.  Of course, maybe you don't use it either -- just sayin'...
2. Since you can't make a contiguous 11000-image 3D array, and don't know how to manage 11000 individual 2D arrays, how about a compromise?  Like, say, 11 3D arrays holding 1000 images each?   Then you just need ~50 MB chunks of contiguous memory.
3.  I'm picturing a partially hardcoded solution in which there are a bunch of cloned "functional globals" which each hold 1000 images of data.  This kind of thing can be done using (A) Reentrant vi's or (B) Template vi's.  You may need to use VI Server to instantiate them at run-time.
4. Then I'd build an "Action Engine" wrapper around that whole bunch of stuff.  It'd have an input for image #, for example, image # 6789.  From there it would do a quotient & remainder with 1000 to split 6789 into a quotient of 6 and remainder of 789.  Then the wrapper would access function global #6 and address image # 789 from it.
5. Specific details and trade offs depend a lot on the nature of your data processing.  My assumption was that you'd primarily need random access to images 1 or 2 at a time. 
I hope to learn some better ideas from other posters...
-Kevin P.
P.S.  Maybe I can be one of those "other posters" -- I just had another idea that should be much simpler.  Create a typedef custom control out of a cluster which contains a 2D image array.  Now make an 11000 element array of these clusters.  If I recall correctly, LabVIEW will allocate 11000 pointers.  The clusters that they point to will *not* need to be contiguous one after the other.  Now you can retrieve an image by indexing into the array of 11000 clusters and simply unbundling the 2D image data from the cluster element.