The major difficulty with the acoustic analogy, however, is that the sound source is not compact in supersonic flow. Errors could be encountered in calculating the sound field, unless the computational domain could be extended in the downstream direction beyond the location where the sound source has completely decayed. Furthermore, an accurate account of the retarded time-effect requires keeping a long record of the time-history of the converged solutions of the sound source, which again represents a storage problem. For realistic problems, the required storage can reach the order of 1 terabyte of data.