[Beowulf] 8GB memeory limit?

[Mark Hahn]

>> try -mcmodel=medium.
>
> ... which doesn't affect malloc() at all. It only affects static data.

oops, duh!  failure of attention.
I'd have to guess the issue is a ulimit.  malloc is mapped (for large
allocations) to an anonymous mmap normally.  it might be interesting to 
strace the config that fails, to verify this.  there's also the kernel's
overcommit setting (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_*) which could cause this effect.

-mark