Help diagnosing PC restart issue while computing matrix pseudo inverse

Hi all,

I am having trouble running a code due to my PC crashing/restarting whilst running. I narrowed down that the crash occurs when trying to use pinv(). I am essentially reconstructing signals, and even with the smallest possible signal, I am required to find the pseudoinverse of a 654*4096 array (I am not sure if this should be considered computationally heavy, but you could say its my minimum requirement).

It was suggested I have a memory issue (8gb RAM) and this may be likely. I'm no expert on the specifics between physical/virtual memory, but I've tried monitoring my physical memory usage prior to crashing using the windows perfmon, and it appears that at least 1 second before crashing (perfmon logs at 1 second intervals) MATLAB is using around 5.2gb ram. Coupled with my remaining processes using ~30% RAM it appears memory could be my issue.

I just wanted to see if anyone else thinks otherwise before I go out and buy some more sticks?

Cheers.

* EDIT: I would like to add that after some debugging, I can say that my PC is crashing while trying to calculate the singular value decomposition SVD, used in the pinv() function... if that helps anyone.

EDIT 2: Tried again with 16gb ram, as well as replacing my initial 2 sticks with 2 brand new sticks, still no luck. Meanwhile my friends can run it fine with 8gb ram. The arrays being produced by the initial part of the code match between me and anyone else, apart from some random noise which is generated in y where z = pinv(x)*y. I got my friend to send over his arrays which worked for him and tried to calculate pinv( on the command line, and PC still crashes.

Answer 1

[James Pittard]

Thank you all for your help. I figured out the issue, I had OC'd my CPU a while ago, and despite running on 'standard performance' in my OC tool, I was still running at 4.5 GHz. Manually changing it back to default and everything works now! (12 hours later)

[Walter Roberson]

(For those whose first language is not English Technical: OC is "Overclock")

Answer 2

[Ahmet Cecen]

Your machine wouldn't just restart for insufficient memory, and in the case of faulty memory, the machine usually freezes. If you want to make sure, use memtest86+:

http://www.memtest.org/

[Ahmet Cecen]

Now move on to:

http://www.mersenne.org/download/

This will stress test your CPU. Check if the machine crashes.

Answer 3

[Walter Roberson]

A complete crash of the system might be hardware, but... Which CPU do you have? In particular do you have an AMD Jaguar series processor?

http://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

[James Pittard]

Hi, thanks for your response. I have an i5 4690k stock. I've spent the whole night reformatting and now I am waiting for MATLAB to download, will see if it changed anything for me.