What's the maximum size of matrices that can be assembled by finite element method in Matlab?

I am interested to know whether a matrix can reach 5e10^6 or simply an order of magnitude of 10^4

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Yes, if you have enough memory, and are willing to wait long enough for each iteration.

[Salvo]

Hi Walter!

When you say "Yes", you mean 5*10^6 or 10^4? well..say,i7 quadcore, 16gb ram,120gb SSD..

[Walter Roberson]

Do you mean total elements, or on a side?

I am going to guess that you want to know about total elements, and I am going to guess that your processing is such that you temporarily need both the old and the new meshes in memory at the same time (sometimes systems are such that you only need to keep a couple of rows of "old" values while you update the "new" values in place.) And guessing about what else might be happening in your session... I'll say you have about 14 gigabytes available for the dual copies, so about 7 gigabytes per copy. Divide by 8 to get the number of nodes each with exactly one double precision value, so about 0.875 giga-elements, or 875,000,000 elements. If you are looking for the figures for a square mesh, it would be on the order of 29000 elements on a side.