On Tue, 11 Dec 2007, PattiMichelle wrote: > I ran into a nasty problem when trying to massage data sets that are > larger than a few gigabytes). You /will/ need 64-bit hardware and a > 64-bit OS. I've used both AMD-64 CPUs, which I prefer for personal > reasons, as well as the newer line of Intel AMD-64 clones - all work > well. I've also used Linux-64, WinXP-64, Win2003Server-64 (which I > consider the most stable of the Windows versions), and Vista-64. > Basically, you'll need to create something like a 20GB of swap file. A > non-64-bit Windows platform will not let you declare larger than a 4 GB > swap file. Also, whatever software you use to visualize the fields (I > prefer RSI's IDL) won't load multi-gigabyte datasets into memory unless > running on a 64-bit OS and hardware.
I don't see why you should need such a large swap file. Hopefully, you should have enough RAM that you won't be swapping to the disk! However, you definitely want a 64-bit OS (GNU/Linux on any recent x86 CPU, either Intel or AMD, should be fine) if you want to work with data more than a couple of gigabytes in size. (A 32-bit OS will limit each process to somewhere between 2 and 4 gigabytes of virtual address space, regardless of how much RAM you have. Technically, you might be able to get around this by using MPI with multiple processes, but it's not worth it to try and hack like this since 64-bit systems are widely available.) Regards, Steven G. Johnson _______________________________________________ meep-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://ab-initio.mit.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/meep-discuss
