Hi Axel,
I understand your reaction. How do you suggest I address it systematically ?
Can you please give me some hints ?
use some common sense! it is always puzzling to me, that as
soon as computers and software get involved even some of the
most analytically thinking people suddenly revert to knee-jerk
reactions, panic and chaos. you are dealing with a machine and
software and those don't have a mind of their own, even if it
sometimes may appear so. on the contrary, you have to consider
them as extremely dumb as they only do what they got programmed
to do, whether it makes sense or not.
that being said, there was just an example posted to
the list giving a lowdown on how to systematically narrow
down a problem, where you don't exactly know where the
origin is (your input or the machine or the compilation, that is).
i'll spell it out to you in more detail again.
first find you whether it is your input or something else that fails.
that can be done by running the example or benchmark inputs
shipped with lammps. there are plenty of them and they are
know to work unless they use (optional) features that you have
not compiled in, or have not been updated for a recent change
in the code (should not happen, but does happen).
second, you have to capture the _real_ error.
what you showed is a secondary message from
the facility that is "babysitting" the lammps processes.
this doesn't show the original problem. how to do
that is very system dependent. ask your local user support.
third you have to validate that the input you use does work well
elsewhere using the same version of the lammps code and
the same number of processors. and then either correct your
input of find out which part of lammps is failing and why.
the amount of information that you have reported is
too little to provide any help or let alone reproduce the
failure that you are seeing. if you say that your input
has X atoms, this is as useful as saying that you run
on a computer that has a green case unless you know
for a fact that the number of atoms has an impact
(or the color of the case).
you _are_ a scientists, right? so address this in a systematic
way just as you would have to address a problem in your research.
if you get an unexpected result there, you just don't go around
and try random things and as other people to speculate about
why you get the results you see, without explaining what it is
that you did, right?
sorry for the hard words, but you asked for it. 
cheers,
axel.
