[FieldTrip] Single Precision in FieldTrip (2011)

["Jörn M. Horschig"]

Dear all,

This mail can be considered as a follow-up from an issue raised back in 
2006 - just a little bit more recent (btw, there maybe should a more 
user-friendly interface to search in the FT mailing archive, it took 
some time to check if this question has been brought up before).

Today, I was thinking about ways to reduce the memory use of 
FieldTrip/Matlab especially when handling large amount of data - other 
ways than using machines with huge memory capacities. In the old mailing 
list, I found a mail conversation started by Ali M. about single 
precision in 2006. Matlab, and FieldTrip, has advanced quite a lot since 
then, which resulted in removing at least that one particular Matlab-bug 
on my machine ;) However, in the past I have found that computations 
using single precision still yields problems such as wrong results or 
also incompatibilty of certain functions/operations. I wonder how severe 
these problems are with current Matlab/FieldTrip versions.

Does anyone have experience with single precision computations using 
FieldTrip? Is it valid or even advisable to use single precision 
calculations?
FYI, my machine runs Win7 64-bit and Matlab 7.9.0.529 (R2009b)

Kind regards,
Jörn

-- 
Jörn M. Horschig
PhD Student
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
Radboud University Nijmegen

P.O. Box 9101
NL-6500 HB Nijmegen
The Netherlands

Contact:
E-Mail: jm.horschig at donders.ru.nl
Tel:    +31-(0)24-36-68493
Web: http://www.ru.nl/fcdonders

Visiting address:
Trigon, room 2.30
Kapitelweg 29
NL-6525 EN Nijmegen
The Netherlands