R help - Jun 2010 - Building Distance Matrix

Dear All,

I tried to build a distance matrix. The following example is using dis fucntion:

a<- 1:100
grid <- as.matrix(expand.grid(a,a))
dis<-as.matrix(dist(grid))

This can create a 10000 x 10000 distance matrix, and the object size is about
764Mb. However, the actual usage of this operation is almost 2680Mb. In a 4G
memory, 32 bit OS machine,  this almost top the memory limit. Is there anyway to
build a distance matrix without using that much memory (I hope just use 764Mb)?

Thank you very much!

SC
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