[Numpy-discussion] NumPy on 64-bit Linux (Opteron)

[Sebastian Haase]

On Wednesday 09 February 2005 11:24 am, Perry Greenfield wrote:
> Sebastian Haase wrote:
> > (RE: numarray)
> > Hi,
> > On an Opteron (Suse9) I was happy to see that I could allocate
> > the memory for
> > an Int32-1024x1024x1024 cube. (On a P4 a get 'MemoryError').
> > I remember that Todd always said that python itself wasn't
> > 64bit-ready yet.
> > But why is it needed to support >4GB python-lists if one is only
> > interested in
> > large numarrays (or numeric) ?
>
> In short, to support the Python sequence protocol (arrays can be
> used anywhere Python code expects sequences transparently). 

Perry,
Thanks for the answer - that's about what I remembered.
Is is conceivable to have a compiler flag (#define) to turn all the sequence 
protocol support off ?  (How many places in the numarray code would that be?)

I think the wish to just allocate large arrays and (even if in a very limited 
way!) work with them is clearly shared by many people.
I always felt having a Py-List longer than billons of elements would have a 
rather low priority in comparison.

Thanks again,
Sebastian


> The 
> good news is that work is well underway in Python to change the
> limit on sequence indices. I think it will take a number of months
> for these changes to make it out (in a released version of Python as
> well as the necessary updates to numarray). As soon as the changes
> are committed to Python CVS, we can start working on updates to
> numarray to support them.
>
> Perry Greenfield