Hi, thanks for all of your comments, I will submit a report giving details of the systems that produce the error. In the mean time any suggestions on a work round would be greatly appreciated.

kernelopts(datalimit); is set to infinity. In the parent shell, typing ulimit -a tells me that

core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 1024
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 131072
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 10240
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 65536
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

I'm not sure which limit would need to be raised? In case it's relevant, a typical example of when the computation produces the error message has memory usage of

 bytes used=33,107,336, alloc=11,008,032, time=7882.39

successful computations typically have memory usage values like 

bytes used=31,361,296,112, alloc=107,721,456, time=3735.86

Thanks, Steve