9!*9! is just little over 131 billion dashboards. checking correctnes (no number is repeated in row or column) is as simple as counting a sum in all boxes, rows and columns.
Generation of all possible boards is little more complex but I can hardly see how it could take "eons" - with proper implementation (Apache Spark :P ) and reasonably powerful hardware (1000 CPU core cluster, ha! ha! ha!) it should run under 1 day and take just little over 13 TB of disk/RAM space :).
9! * 9! is not the number of boards, that is a bad estimate. If you don't account for symmetries, rotations, re-numberings and other things, the number of boards is 6.7e21. Even if you could check a full board in a nanosecond (which you can't) enumerating that number would take more than 200,000 cpu-years.
The paper linked to in the OP's article says: "Due to the sheer number of sudoku solution grids a brute force search would have been infeasible, but we found a better approach to make this project possible. Our software for exhaustively searching through a completed sudoku grid, named checker, was originally released in 2006. However, this first version was rather slow. Indeed, the paper [1] estimates that our original checker of late 2006 would take over 300,000 processor-years in order to search every sudoku grid."
The estimate in the comment (9!*9!) seems to be implying a simple enumeration, not a complex strategy of symmetry-folding. But even if you do reduce the enumeration, the authors of that paper say their software requires 800 CPU years. I'm not making any claims about whether getting that down to a day might be possible, but I wish you good luck. By all means, show everyone how to do it with a proper implementation and a large cluster! ;)
Generation of all possible boards is little more complex but I can hardly see how it could take "eons" - with proper implementation (Apache Spark :P ) and reasonably powerful hardware (1000 CPU core cluster, ha! ha! ha!) it should run under 1 day and take just little over 13 TB of disk/RAM space :).