title: Large Matrices in R: long vectors not supported yet
body: <p>I am running 64 bit R 3.1 in a 64bit Ubuntu environment with 400GB of RAM, and I am encountering a strange limitation when dealing with large matrices. </p>
  
  <p>I have a numeric matrix called A, that is 4000 rows by 950,000 columns.  When I try to access any element in it, I receive the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error: long vectors not supported yet: subset.c:733
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Although my matrix was read in via <code>scan</code>, you can replicate with the following code</p>
  
  <pre><code>test &lt;- matrix(1,4000,900000) #no error
  test[1,1] #error
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My Googling reveals this was a common error message prior to R 3.0, where a vector of size 2^31-1 was the limit.  However, this is not the case, given my environment.</p>
  
  <p>Should I not be using the native matrix type for this kind of matrix?</p>