Hi there R-helpers:

I'm having problems with the function ode() found in the package deSolve.
It seems that when my state variables are too numerous (>33000 elements),
the function throws the following error:

Error in vode(y, times, func, parms, ...) :
  cannot allocate memory block of size 137438953456.0 Gb
In addition: Warning message:
In vode(y, times, func, parms, ...) : NAs introduced by coercion

This appears to be case regardless of the computer I use; that is, whether
it's a laptop or server with 24Gb of RAM. Why is ode() trying to allocate
137 billion gigabytes of memory?! (I receive exactly the same error message
whether I have, for example, 34000 or 80000 state variables: the amount of
memory trying to be allocated is exactly the same.) I have included a
trivial example below that uses a function that returns a rate of change of
zero for all state variables.

> require(deSolve)
Loading required package: deSolve
> C<-rep(0,34000)
> TestFunc<-function(t,C,para){
+         return(list(rep(0,length(C))))
+ }
> soln<-ode(y=C,times=seq(0,1,0.1),func=TestFunc,parms=c(0),method="vode")
Error in vode(y, times, func, parms, ...) :
  cannot allocate memory block of size 137438953456.0 Gb
In addition: Warning message:
In vode(y, times, func, parms, ...) : NAs introduced by coercion
>

Am I making a foolish mistake somewhere or is this simply a limitation of
the function?

Thanks in advance!

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