Need advice on using R with large datasets

"Roger D. Peng" <rpeng at jhsph.edu> writes:

As far as I know, R does compile on AMD Opterons and runs as a 64-bit
application.  So it can store objects larger than 4GB. However, I
don't think R gets tested very often on 64-bit machines with such
large objects so there may be yet undiscovered bugs.

There are a few such machines around among R users, and R seems to
work OK on them. One slight gotcha is that the Fortran numeric
libraries (Lapack, ATLAS) tend to use integer indexing, which might
overflow for large objects. Things like data frames which consist of
multiple subobjects might be less sensitive to this.

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907