> Most are 500x500px > > > How big do you want the output image? (All in > > pixels pls.) > > 101000x149000px
Oooouch, nice blowjob. Unless you have software which specifically operates in a sparse-matrix environment, i.e. not storing elements which are 0 or non-existant, you'll need (assuming 8bit/pixel) a byte for each of those - that's 15GB. I've heard of quad AMD64 with 4GB of RAM per processor (the sort of thing R�diger will be looking at), but you don't want to know the price. I think you should re-examine the problem and find a solution not involving an outragously sized bitmap... ;) Think further - even if that bitmap compressed very well and could be stored in 10MB disk space, each time you access it you'd have to decompress it into memory. And unless you can access it, there's little point in having it. If you really can't do without my guess is you'd have to program your own image processing routines, implementing the sparse type tricks, which doesn't sound efficient. Given you're at NIWA, do you have access to matlab and can check whether your files can be read as binary data in a sparse matrix? Octave is a 2*free replacement for matlab but it's not as advanced. Can you break down the problem into chunks of say 10000x10000 pixels max? In any case it looks like a grunty PC would be in order. Let us know how you get on! Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
