Faster File IO I need faster file IO to match the GPU abilities

I’m not familiar with C (have been programming in C#, Fortran. SQL mostly)

To make the best use of the awsum speed of GPU I need faster file reading than my newbie C is giving.
I have written code that reads binary files very nicely, but the code I have written for reading asciiGrids and time-series files seems slow.

So for text files such as this (but this is only a tiny bit of it) is there a way to read the data grid that is significantly better than the code below (but not to complicated)

Thanks in advance for any help :)
Keith

---- sample file ( full file has heaps more columns and rows ) —
NCOLS 9117
NROWS 1219
XLLCORNER 141.475
YLLCORNER -30.525
CELLSIZE 0.005
NODATA_VALUE -9999.9
Elem:WQD 19990101
127.625 127.6875 127.75 140.4375
793.75 125.0 6.25 18.125
17374.0625 4.375 2.5 12.5
17378.5625 4.375 125.0 62.5
3.6 3.7 3.9 4.1
0.1 0.1 -8.1 -9999.9

---- code ----
// NB another chunk of code reads the header //
int readGridF( float *h_grid, FILE fp, long rows, long columns )
{
for (int rr = 0; rr < rows; rr++)
{
for ( int cc = 0; cc < columns; cc++)
fscanf( fp, “%f”, &h_grid[rr
columns + cc]);
}
return (ferror(fp));
}

I have posted a prototype solution in different part of forum, if you are interested it is [topic=“105782”]here[/topic]