Re: Building on OSX without package managers

[Richard Campbell]

On Jan 24, 2011, at 11:35 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 24-Jan-2011, Richard Campbell wrote:
> 
> | I've had some success with building universal binaries with
> | configure scripts on 64-bit Macs in the past, so I expect that I can
> | eventually get it to work. It's also possible that a 64-bit-only
> | version might be necessary. Does the --enable-64 function for
> | indexing integer size require that the binary itself be 64-bit,
> | though?
> 
> Unless you intend to use Octave for very large arrays and you have a
> lot of memory (say at least 16GB) then you probably don't need to use
> the --enable-64 configure option.
> 
> To understand what --enable-64 does, please read the section
> "Compiling Octave with 64-bit Indexing" in the version of the Octave
> manual that is distributed with Octave 3.3.55 or 3.3.90 (the section
> was recently added, so it is not in older versions).
> 
> jwe

I have 12 GB of RAM and I intend to use this on other machines with 16+ GB. 
Today I'm trying to load a contiguous block of 920 MB of complex doubles 
written to disk from some C code. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gives me an 
out of memory error (the kind where you have to restart Octave and try again).

We do acoustic propagation modelling and signal processing. Our regular 
workflow is built around in-house C code which only links to FFTW and 
occasionally netCDF, with liberal use of OpenMP. Since high end Macs have 24 
logical cores now, this makes it really easy to quickly generate more output 
than you can load into Octave (or 32-bit Matlab, I assume) to view.