Gradient Merge Mosaic Out of Memory

[jjanusz]

I have run many of the different processes in PI on my Win XP32 system without memory issues.  I am trying to merge two 16803 images that have been prepared in Star Alignment and I get the out of memory error.  Is the only fix moving to 64bit or is there a work around?  Any help will be appreciated I'm a brand new user. 

One other Q. I'm using the evaluation version, if I need 64bit can I get both 32 and 64 when I purchase?

 Jim

[Nocturnal]

When you buy a license you can run any flavor you like. If you have maxed out the RAM on your XP box (say you have 3GB or more) then it's likely you need a more serious machine. Luckily they cost next to nothing compared to astro equipment.

[georg.viehoever]

For situations like this, I also worked with booking a machine on Amazon EC2, and do the critical operation there. Depending on the machine type you book, this costs you betwee.n $0.10 and $3.00 per hour http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing . They also have a trial offer on a smalll machine (instance) that is essentially free for a year.

Georg

[zvrastil]

According to my experience, it is possible to do GradientMergeMosaic with small number of frames (2-3) even on machine with 2GB of physical memory, as long as you do it in 64bit system (Linux in my case). Same attempt on the same machine with 32bit system failed miserably.

regards, Zbynek

[RobF2]

At the risk of upsetting purists Jim, the other option is to save your FITS down to TIFF (16 bit unsigned).  Often keeps me going if I want to see if something is worth pursuing in XP32.  This is the one thing spurring me to get up to date with OSs at the moment though must confess.  For your large images you'd probably have to down-sample as well ("Resample" tool) which makes it doubley pointless.

The EC2 clouds is fascinating - wouldn't it take ages to get software etc installed though?

[georg.viehoever]

EC2 has preconfigured Linux/Windows images (i.e. everything you need to start a basic OS). All you need to install is PI, which is quite quick. Once you have figured out how to start instances and how to get a GUI on your remote desktop, its a matter of minutes. The "Getting Started" guides by Amazon provide the information you need.

Georg