Converting geographical projection of extremely large file using GDAL?

I suggest tackling this using Virtual Raster Table (.vrt) format. How the end result is to be used will determine how many steps are needed.

Simplest possible case is the end product will be used by a GDAL or GDAL-aware program, create one .vrt in the desired projection and then use that in your final program:

gdalwarp -t_srs wgs84 -of vrt D:\gisdata\bigtiff*.tif test.vrt

This will probably only be feasible if the final program is using a small portion (view window) of the image at a time as the reprojection calculations happen at run time. This can be ameliorated by calculating overviews with gdaladdo:

gdaladdo -ro test.vrt 2 4 8 16 32 64

(nb: on my computer at moment this isn't creating external files like it used to. Might need to add some steps.)

Mapbox has an excellent and detailed article on a complex workflow using very large images with virtual rasters and multiple calculation steps: Super Sharp 50cm Pléiades Satellite Imagery on MapBox.com

It looks very strange, but warping with QGIS (which runs its embedded gdalwarp) is much faster!

I was able to process 14Gb file in 70 minutes, on windows, without much resource consumption. It still was not looking like it used multiple cores, but did the work, which is great. Also, it seems the same applies to gdal_translate.

Probably, they build gdal correctly, or something. The version is GDAL 1.11.2, released 2015/02/10.

Small note: on my files gdal_translate utility does all the work, but then places an error message: "incorrect file format: ". I ignored this message, because the file was correct.