Segmentation fault when turning on upperWall using lib/colvars

Dear All,

I am experiencing some problem with the latest version of lib/colvars (2016). This problem can be reproduced with the example files provided with lammps: examples/USER/colvars.

To reproduce the problem, I add an additional block to the peptide.colvars file:
colvar {
name three

gyration {
atoms {
atomNumbers 2 4 5 6
}
}
upperBoundary 10
upperWall 10
upperWallConstant 5
}

With the modified file, the following error appeared after running lammps: lmp_openmpi < in.peptide-colvars

colvars: Re-initialized atom group one:0/0. 4 atoms: total mass = 4.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group one:0/1. 1 atoms: total mass = 1.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group two:0/0. 4 atoms: total mass = 4.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group two:0/1. 1 atoms: total mass = 1.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group three:0/0. 4 atoms: total mass = 4.
colvars: The restart output state file will be “rest.colvars.state”.
colvars: The final output state file will be “out.colvars.state”.
colvars: Writing to colvar trajectory file “out.colvars.traj”.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group one:0/0. 4 atoms: total mass = 15.035.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group one:0/1. 1 atoms: total mass = 12.011.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group two:0/0. 4 atoms: total mass = 15.035.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group two:0/1. 1 atoms: total mass = 12.011.
colvars: Re-initialized atom group three:0/0. 4 atoms: total mass = 15.035.
[eofe4:mpi_rank_0][error_sighandler] Caught error: Segmentation fault (signal 11)
Segmentation fault

I appreciate any comment on the possible issue here.

Best regards,
Bin

Thanks for reporting it! The error is not due to upperWall, but rather the variable gyration itself.

You can find an explanation of the error here:
https://github.com/colvars/colvars/issues/95

where you can also find a way to adjust the input to recover the functionality.

Alternatively, you can just update Colvars in your LAMMPS copy using today’s snapshot from here:
https://github.com/colvars/colvars

Giacomo