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

[Perry Greenfield]

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). 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