I was able to produce the output file in just over 3 minutes on a crappy laptop. It's not parallel, and is not as simple as BrowserUKs suggested module, and certainly not as screamingly fast as marioroys. But I wanted to share it in case someone finds it interesting. It should be straightforward to use Getopt::Std to make the values and number levels command line options.

My understanding:
• This is similar to a lottery with each ball labeled 0 through 5, divided by 5, and there are 11 balls.
• The goal is to put all of the approx 362 million combinations (6**11) with values separated by tabs and two 1s appended to each line. I suspect this is just a format that's parsed outside this code portion, but will stick with it. If the same combinations are output as integers 0..5 without the 1's at the end of each line, the file is about half the size.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

# values
my @val = qw(0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0);

my $tiers = 11;

# map array indices to values
my $m = {};
{
   my $i = int 0;
   map { $m->{$i++} = $_ } @val;
}

# first tier
my $p = \@val;

# create each additional tier skipping first
# that's already in $p
for (my $i = 2; $i <= $tiers; $i++)
{
   my $tmp;
   map { $tmp->[$_] = $p; } keys %{$m};
   $p = $tmp;
}

# output file
open(my $outfile, '>', '/tmp/output.txt') or die $!;

# use recursion to decend the huge matrix
# build up the string at each tier
my $fn;
$fn = sub 
{
   my ($aref, $str) = @_;

   for (my $i = int 0; $i < @{$aref}; $i++)
   {
      if(ref($aref->[$i]))
      {
         $fn->($aref->[$i], $str."\t".$val[$i]);
         next;
      }
      # end of the line, print last tier of values
      print $outfile $str."\t".$_."\t1\t1\n" for @val;
      last;
   }
};

# kick off the recursion, could do these in parallel
# at the top-most layer
for (my $i = int 0; $i < @{$p}; $i++)
{
   $fn->($p->[$i], $val[$i]);
}
[download]

Unsurprisingly the I/O seems to take up a good deal of the time. It's a 17.4GB file with 362797056 lines, but perl only seems to take about 5MB of resident memory (27MB virtual) while running. I certainly wouldn't want to keep the output in memory, but the array-refs would be just fine to pass around.

• Outputting the full list to file: real 3m10.826s, user 2m34.365s
• Using 'wc -l' to count the lines in the file took: real 2m51.092s, user 0m3.696s
• If I comment out the print: real 1m0.890s, user 1m0.775s
• And finally, just initially generating the array-ref matrix, commenting out calling the recursion: real 0m0.010s, user 0m0.007s, using ddx to print the array-refs pushes it up to 0.034s.

So depending on what else is being done, and how many times the parameters are changed, it might make sense to just hold the initial huge matrix of array-refs in memory and pull combinations off for further processing in batches.

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