[Numpy-discussion] Summation of large float32/float64 arrays

[Alan G Isaac]

On 5/21/2010 4:13 PM, Matthew Turk wrote:
> a1 = numpy.random.random((512,512,512)).astype("float32")


This consistently gives me a "MemoryError".
I believe I have plenty of physical memory.
(That should require about 1.3G during creation, right?
I have 8G.) It seems I'm hitting some kind of 1G
memory use limit.How to think about this?

I can create the initial 64 bit array no problem.
However I cannot create the second 32 bit array,
despite having plenty of physical memory.
The copy method also fails; or even creating a
second array the same size fails, unless I first
delete `a1`.

I realize this is probably a naive and operating system
dependent question.  Apologies if it is off topic.

Thanks,
Alan Isaac
(running 32bit Python 2.6.5 on 64bit Vista;
NumPy version import 1.4.1rc2)