Welcome to the forum, @mfkirk!
Thanks for putting together such a detailed post. This situation is not uncommon, and I suspect you're right (this is likely an out-of-memory error), but there are other things that could be happening.
What is the actual error message? Does it indicate a SIGKILL? These are often OOM errors, but could be caused by other things too (e.g. your computer misbehaving when it goes to sleep, etc).
Here are some things you can do to troubleshoot/work around the issue. Definitely check that your VM is provisioned the way that you expect before doing anything else.
Looking forward:
- There are other memory-intensive commands you'll run into during your analysis. Many of them have parameters that let you reduce memory needs, "chunking" your data, or reducing the size of some computational widget to make make things go easier on your ram. Keep an eye out for these in the docs.
- If you run into other issues, check out the forum's search
feature. Most common problems have been treated at length here, and it may take you less time to find an answer than to write up a new post.
Good luck!
Chris 