Static arrays in Fortran with g77

Static arrays in Fortran with g77

[Chris Sykes]

Hello all.

The company I work for is planning on buying a 4-way AMD opteron based
system with about 8GiB of RAM.  It'll be running SuSE Enterprise
Server 8 for x86-64.

We currently have have some scientific code written in Fortran77 that
processes data stored in a couple of very large statically allocated
arrays.

A couple of weeks back I had an opertunity to test some of our code on
an 8GiB opteron system, and had problems when trying to compile the
code when the static arrays grew above 2GiB in size.  I can't remember
the exact error but is an assembler error complaining that "<large
negative number> is an invalid array size" or something similar.
The gcc in question was 3.3.

What I'm wondering is, if it is possible, how do I get an environment
whereby the f77 code can allocate huge static arrays (6GiB+)?
I'm quite happy to recompile the kernel, binutils, glibc, gcc etc.
I just want to check that this can actually be done under Linux.

I'd very much appreciate any help / advice that anyone can give on
this matter.

Cheers.

-- 
Chris Sykes <chris.sykes@ohmsurveys.com>
Sysadmin/Programmer - OHM Ltd. UK.
http://www.ohmsurveys.com
Phone: +44 (0)870 429 6594
Fax: +44 (0)870 429 6582