Why does my program crash?

There are many different reasons why an application could crash. We cannot list all the different possibilities, but we will help you to investigate.

OOM

One common reason is a limited amount of memory. Then the application could crash with an Out Of Memory exception.

Stack size

On our XC system (Māui) the stack size is limited. If you application needs more resources on stack, if could result in strange unpredictable crashes. You could get for example an `array index out of bounds` error, not directly pointing to the source of the issue. You can try to unlimit stack size using `ulimit -s unlimited` in your submission script.

Debugger

Another common issue is an error in the code. For example an application could (may to unexpected input and missing error handling) call a division by 0. Debugger can help to find the source of the issue. On the NeSI systems are different debuggers available. For serial application the Gnu debugger gdb is available. Furthermore, the ARM DDT debugger is available, which can handle, parallel, serial, applications, written in C/C++, Fortran, and Python (limited support).