How can I load large files (~150MB) in MATLAB?

Question

I have a large MATLAB file (150MB) in matrix form (i.e. 4070x4070). I need to work on this file in MATLAB but I can't seem to load this file. I am getting an "out of memory" error. Is there any other way I can load this size of file? I am using a 32bit processor and have 2GB of RAM. Please help me, I am getting exhausted from dealing with this problem.

Answer 1

Starting from release R2011b (ver.7.13) there is a new object matlab.io.MatFile with MATFILE as a constructor. It allows to load and save parts of variables in MAT-files. See the documentation for more details. Here is a simple example to read part of a matrix:

matObj = matfile(filename);
a = matObj.a(100:500, 200:600);

If your original file is not a MAT file, but some text file, you can read it partially and use matfile to save those parts to the same variable in a MAT file for later access. Just remember to set Writable property to true in the constructor.

Assuming your text file is tab-delimited and contains only numbers, here is a sample script to read the data by blocks and save them to MAT file:

blocksize = 100;
startrow = 0;
filename = 'test.mat';
matObj = matfile(filename,'Writable',true);
while true
    try
        a = dlmread(filename,'\t',startrow,0); %# depends on your file format
        startrow = startrow + blocksize;
        matObj.a(startrow+(1:blocksize),:) = a;
    catch
        break
    end
end

I don't have the latest release now to test, but hope it should work.