All,

Got a tricky situation and unfortunately because it's a big file I can't
exactly provide an example, so I'll describe this as best I can for
everyone.

I have a distance matrix that we are using for a modeling calculation in
space for multiple days.  Since the matrix is never going to change for
different dates, I want to keep the matrix in a file and refer to that so I
don't have to repeat the calculation over and over again for that.  The
problem is it's a 32000 X 32000 matrix and roughly works out to 15GB of
storage.  This makes it a trick to read the file back into R, but it leaves
me with two questions for the group.

Is there anyway to have R write this out so that it takes up less space?  I
know R primarily treats numbers as doubles, but I'm trying to find a way to
get R to write the values as floats or singles.

with how big it is, it may not be wise to save it as an object in R when
read in, so I'm wondering is there anyway to have R do the calculation it
needs to do without saving the matrix as an object in R?  Basically can I
have it run the calculation off the file itself?

Thanks!

Adrienne


-- 
Adrienne Wootten
Graduate Research Assistant
State Climate Office of North Carolina
Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
North Carolina State University

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