Hello Hui, On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 2:12 AM, Hui Wang <huiwang.biost...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dear all, > > I've run into a question of handling large matrices in R. I'd like to > define a 70000*70000 matrix in R on Platform: > x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit), but it seems to run out of memory > to handle this. Is it due to R memory limiting size or RAM of my laptop? If > I use a cluster with larger RAM, will that be able to handle this large > matrix in R? Thanks much!
Do you really mean 7e4 by 7e4? That would be 4.9e9 entries. If each entry takes 8 bytes (as it typically would on a 64 bit system), you would need close to 40 Gigabyte storage for this matrix. I'm not sure there is a laptop on the market with that amount of RAM. What do you need such a large matrix for? If most of the elements are zero, you don't want a regular matrix to hold the data, but use some sort of sparse matrix implementation. Take care Oliver -- Oliver Ruebenacker Bioinformatics Consultant (http://www.knowomics.com/wiki/Oliver_Ruebenacker) Knowomics, The Bioinformatics Network (http://www.knowomics.com) SBPAX: Turning Bio Knowledge into Math Models (http://www.sbpax.org) ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.