[R] R Crashes when using "large" matrices (Ubuntu 11.04)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, Matias Salibian-Barrera wrote:

> Hello,
>
> This simple SVD calculation (commands are copied immediately below) 
> crashes on my Ubuntu machine (R 2.13.0). However it works fine on my 
> Windows 7 machine, so I suspect there's a problem with (my?) Ubuntu 
> and / or R. Can anybody else reproduce it (with Ubuntu 11.04)? 
> Thanks in advance.

>From the traceback, the error appears to be in LAPACK or BLAS.
There is no evidence here that 'R crashes' rather than one of those 
crashed R.

You don't tell us whether you compiled R yourself or used someone 
else's pre-compiled distribution -- if the latter, ask on r-sig-debian 
as this is most likely a problem with the distribution, since 
Debian/Ubuntu builds normally replace R's LAPACK/BLAS with that from 
the OS.

It works correctly on a vanilla R build on i686 Fedora 14.

>
> p <- 500
> n <- 300
> set.seed(1234)
> x <- matrix(rnorm(n*p), n, p)
> sih <- var(x)
> b <- svd(sih)
>
> produces:
>
>  *** caught illegal operation ***
> address 0x42b8c9, cause 'illegal operand'
>
> Traceback:
>  1: .Call("La_svd", jobu, jobv, x, double(min(n, p)), u, v, "dgsedd",     PACKAGE = "base")
>  2: La.svd(x, nu, nv)
>  3: svd(sih)
>
> I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 and
>> version
>                _                           
> platform       i686-pc-linux-gnu           
> arch           i686                        
> os             linux-gnu                   
> system         i686, linux-gnu             
> status                                     
> major          2                           
> minor          13.0                        
> year           2011                        
> month          04                          
> day            13                          
> svn rev        55427                       
> language       R                           
> version.string R version 2.13.0 (2011-04-13)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matias
>
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595