Harris,
we had similar problem recently with lidar data set with similar number of points
and similar size of raster on a similar machine
it looks like bug/memory leak to me because we commonly compute much larger DEMs from much larger data sets.
I would love to find out what is causing this - are you using a mask?
which version of GRASS do you use - we have fixed few memory leaks recently but I was still running
out of memory for this particular data set after 86% was done.
There is no reason for the program to run out of memory near the end of the execution - it either
runs out of memory at the beginning due to extremely large number of points or it should finish.
If you could email me more info about the parameters that you are using and the data set
maybe we can find it,
Helena
Helena Mitasova
Dept. of Marine, Earth and Atm. Sciences
1125 Jordan Hall, NCSU Box 8208,
Raleigh NC 27695
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/