What is the largest amount of memory MATLAB can allocate?

This may seem like a little simple question to some, surely, but I haven't been able to find a direct answer online.

How much memory does MATLAB needs for a single double value (from my undes开发者_高级运维tanding it is his default data type) and taking that into account what would be the largest amount of memory it could allocate on a PC (with more than enough RAM)? Are there any restrictions in that view?

This is in view that on my faculty we're thinking about transferring some programs which have been written in C to MATLAB, but are concerned about such issues.

'For floating-point numbers, MATLAB uses 4 or 8 bytes for single and double types.' <- quote from here. The memory model of Matlab is quite flexible. Five years ago I was inverting 1,000,000 by 1,000,000 matrices on a cluster using an add-on package Star-p which I guess was recently acquired by Microsoft.

As long as you're on a 64bit box, you can access 2^64 bytes of memory <- Matlab is simply limited by the physical limitations of your box, though as noted above, there are solutions to create a shared memory pool across a cluster of computers within a single Matlab environment.

See here and look up what the max size is for your machine specs. For Windows XP 32 bit, the total workspace size (max) is about 1700 MB and the largest matrix size is about 1200 MB.