I'm using two different machines, both of which run Ubuntu AMD64. Using the command a = rand(b,b), I find that I can set b=17000 on a machine that has 2GB of RAM. It goes into swap, but it works. That machine has Octave
2.9.12 installed, and the CPU is AMD Turion dual core. On another machine that has 8GB RAM and plenty of swap space, I get the message "memory exhausted or requested size too large for range of Octave's index type". That machine has
2.9.14 installed, and the CPUs are two Xeons, a couple of years old. I believe that the compile options I used for Octave were --enable-shared --disable-static on both machines. I don't understand why the machine with more RAM is reluctant to create the matrix.
Thanks, MIchael