"No enought room on startup disk for Application Memory" when using the Accelerate Framework

Question

Dear colleagues,
I am running what I know is a large problem for a scientific application (tochnog) a finite element solver that runs from the Terminal. The application tries to solve 1,320,000 simultaneous linear equations. The problem starts when I use the Accelerate Framework as the Virtual Memory size jumps from 142 G to about 576 G after the library  (LAPACK) is called to solve the system.It does not do it if I use a solver that does not calls LAPACK inside Accelerate.
The machine is a mac pro desktop with 8 GB of ram, the 2.66 GHz Quad-core Intel and the standard 640 GB hard drive. The system tells me that I have 487 GB available on hard drive.
The top instruction in Terminal reads VM 129G vsize when starting. When I run the finite element application once the LAPACK library in the Accelerate framework gets called, the Virtual Memory (VM) jumps to 563 G vsize.
After a short while, I get the "No enought room on startup disk for Application Memory error"
This is a screen capture of the application attempting to solve the problem using the LAPACK library inside the Accelerate framework: Here are the numbers as reported by the activity Monitor.
Tochnog Real Memory 6.68 GB
System Memory  Free: 33.8 MB, Wired 378.8 MB, Active 5.06 GB, Inactive 2.53 GB, Used 7.96 GB.
VM size 567.52 GB, Page ins 270.8 MB, Page outs 108.2 MB, Swap used 505 MB
This is a screen copy of the same application solving the same problemwithout using the Accelerate framework.
Tochnog Real Memory 1.96 GB,
System Memory  Free: 4.52 MB, Wired 382.1 MB, Active 2.69 GB, Inactive 416.2 GB, Used 3.47 GB.
VM size 148.60 GB, Page ins 288.8 MB, Page outs 108.2 MB, Swap used 2.5 MB
I can not understand the disparity in the behavior for the same case. As I said before, the only difference is the use of Accelerate in the first case. Also, as you can see, I thought that 8 GB of ram memory was a lot.
Your help will be greatly appreciated
Best regards,
F Lorenzo

Answer 1

The OP had posted this question in the iMac Intel forum.
I replied along similar lines, but suggested he repost this in the SL forum where I know there are usually several people who have a far better grasp of these issues than I.
I would be interested in getting their take on this.
Although, I think you are coming to the correct conclusion that there are not enough resources available for this process, I'm not certain that what you are saying on the way to that conclusion is correct. My understanding of VM is that it is the total theoretical demand on memory a process might make. It is not necessarily the actual or real world demand being made.
As such, this process is not actually demanding 568GB (rounded.) As evidence of that, you can see there is still memory available, albeit quite small, in the form of free memory of 33.8MB and inactive of 2.53GB (the GB for that figure, above, seems like it might be a typo, since for the process when not using Accelerate the reported figure for inactive was 416.2 GB -- surely impossible) and 7.96GB used. The process, itself, is using 6.68GB real memory.
In addition, I question whether the OP has misstated the 487GB free drive space. I think that might be the total drive capacity, not the free space.
My guess is that it is the combination of low available memory and low free drive space prompting this error.
From Dr. Smoke on VM:
it is possible that swap files could grow to the point where all free space on your disk is consumed by them. This can happen if you are very low on both RAM and free disk space.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/2232469?messageID=2232469&#2232469
This gets more to the actual intent of your question...
EDIT: Looks like some kind of glitch right now getting to the Dr. Smoke post.
Message was edited by: WZZZ
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