Large Matrices in R: long vectors not supported yet

Question

I am running 64 bit R 3.1 in a 64bit Ubuntu environment with 400GB of RAM, and I am encountering a strange limitation when dealing with large matrices.

I have a num

Answer 1

An alternate, quick-hand solution would be to first get the row and then the column (now the i'th element of the resulting vector) of the matrix. For example ...

test <- matrix(1,4000,900000) #no error 
test[1,1] #error
test[1, ][1] # no error

Of course, this produces some overhead, as the whole row is copied/accessed first, but it's more straightforward to read. Also works for first extracting the column and then the row.