OUT-OF-CORE ALGORITHM

In computer science and applications, 'out-of-core' refers to algorithms which process data that is too large to fit into a computer's main memory at one time. Such algorithms must be optimized to efficiently fetch and access data stored in slow bulk memory such as hard drive or tape drives.
A typical example is geographic information systems, especially digital elevation models, where the full data set easily exceeds several gigabytes or even terabytes of data.