Whenever I use the mldivide function or \ operator matlab crashes.

As I have mentioned in the title, for some reason whenever I use mldivide or the \ operator Matlab suddenly crashes. ex : s = A\B or s = mldivide(A,B). My variables are quite big : A is 19881x19881 sparse double and B is 19881x1 double.

Could this be why? Am I running out of memory? My PC runs x64 Win10 and has 6Gb of RAM, the Matlab version is 2013b. Note that I do not face the same problem with Lunix on "weaker" machines. Also, it is interesting to note that with older versions of Matlab (like 2009), there is no problem.

I have no idea why this happens and the error message I get before the crash does not present any kind of hint as to what might be causing it. The error message I get is as follows : MATLAB has encountered an internal problem and needs to close. Then there is a bunch of useless info saying that my work is lost and that I need to restart Matlab.

I have searched online to no avail. Any help is very appreciated.

Thanks :)

[Walter Roberson]

I remember there was a problem where there could be crashes when the CPU was being "used hard". Unfortunately the details are not coming to mind at the moment. It was not mldivide or mrdivide specific.

Let me see... the systems that it crashes on, are those systems with AMD cpus?

[Firas Mourad]

I in fact have an AMD Radeon.

[Matt J]

How sparse is the matrix, as measured by nnz(A)/numel(A) ?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/138692-matrix-multiply-crashes-matlab-2014a-on-a-amd-a6-1450-apu-under-either-windows-8-1-64-bit-or-linux

The problem affected AMD Jaguar CPUs

[Firas Mourad]

Thank you very much Sir. As presented in the link provided by you, I had to create environmental variables for my windows user, and set them specific values. This slved the problem.

[Walter Roberson]

Excellent, my memory isn't completely gone ;-)

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

How did you create the sparse matrix?

1. Did you create it using MATLAB commands like sparse?
2. Did you create it using mxCreateSparse? If so, are you certain that your sparse matrix remained valid when you modified the pr, ir, and jc data?
3. Did some external application create the sparse matrix and store it in a MAT-file?

[Firas Mourad]

Hello,

The command sparse was used.

[Steven Lord]

Please send a MAT-file with the two matrices as well as the crash log file to Technical Support for further investigation.

[Walter Roberson]

This was one of those ones that would have been pretty difficult to search out in the support records unless you had the key bit of information "AMD", which then made it fairly easy to find.