# SingularValueDecomposition causes kernel crash in 11.3

Bug introduced in 11.3 or earlier and persisting through 11.3 or later

test = Table[RandomReal[{-2, 2}], {3600}, {11}];

Dimensions[test]


{3600, 11}

Calling SingularValueDecomposition on test crashes the kernel:

{u, s, v} = SingularValueDecomposition[test];


Version 11.3 running on Windows 7 (64 bit).

Can anyone duplicate this behavior?

• This has no bearing on your question, but your Table can just be test = RandomReal[{-2, 2}, {3600, 11}]. – b3m2a1 Mar 23 '18 at 6:07
• It spins for a while for me, which suggests it's just eating up too much memory (I didn't let it crash). Same thing happens with Eigensystem on big matrices. – b3m2a1 Mar 23 '18 at 6:09
• Thanks for testing. ByteCount shows the matrix test is only 300KB in size. I don't believe memory use could be the issue. BTW 11.2 works fine. – ulvi Mar 23 '18 at 6:41
• Works fine for me on version 13.3 on macos 10.13.3... – Henrik Schumacher Mar 23 '18 at 9:21
• @gwr Sorry, I mean version 11.3... =D But let me assure you that they won't have been able to fix the front-end issues in version 13.3... ;) – Henrik Schumacher Mar 23 '18 at 10:54

So I thought I could replicate this on Mac (I can't) but I can instead show a different front-end bug.

Consider this:

MaxMemoryUsed[]

38222504

SingularValueDecomposition@
RandomReal[{-2, 2}, {3600, 11}] // ByteCount

103998304

MaxMemoryUsed[]

141054992


This is fast.

But if I try to display the resultant matrix instead of just calling ByteCount it takes ~1 min and suddenly I've use ~2 GB of memory:

MaxMemoryUsed[]

1994237832

• I observe the same with version 11.3 on macos. However, note that the first entry of the resulting list is a 3600 x 3600 matrix. It is not unusual that the front-end chokes when told to display matrices of this size... – Henrik Schumacher Mar 23 '18 at 10:53

Seems to work fine under 11.3 on Linux x64 with 64GB ....

test = Table[RandomReal[{-2, 2}], {3600}, {11}];
{u, s, v} = SingularValueDecomposition[test];


gets me

s =
{{72.0325,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.},{0.,70.9864,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.},{0.,0.,70.4064,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.}, \[CenterEllipsis]3595\[CenterEllipsis] ,{0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.},{0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,0.}}


with

Dimensions[#] & /@ {u, s, v}


as expected.

I contacted support and here is their response:

Thank you for contacting Wolfram Technical Support.

I was able to reproduce the issue, and consequently, I filed a report with our development team raising the issues and also included your contact information with them so you can be notified once the issue is resolved.