I Made Zig Compute 33 Million Satellite Positions in 3 Seconds. No GPU Required
Summary
The author optimizes SGP4 satellite propagation in Zig using SIMD to reach 11–13 million propagations per second in native code, with Python bindings around 7 million per second. The work introduces three SIMD-based propagation modes, a polynomial atan2 approximation for vectorized math, and a struct-of-arrays data layout to maximize cache efficiency, achieving large-scale performance that outpaces traditional implementations.