Why is my STAR reference genome indexing aborting on my GNU/Linux server but not on my Mac OS X laptop? I am running the following command to index my genome:

STAR --runThreadN 8 --runMode genomeGenerate --genomeDir output/index/star --genomeFastaFiles ref.fa --sjdbGTFfile ref.gff3 --sjdbGTFtagExonParentTranscript Parent --sjdbOverhang 100

and I get the following output:

Feb 27 10:27:37 ..... started STAR run
Feb 27 10:27:37 ... starting to generate Genome files
Feb 27 10:27:40 ... starting to sort Suffix Array. This may take a long time...
Feb 27 10:27:42 ... sorting Suffix Array chunks and saving them to disk...
Feb 27 10:28:26 ... loading chunks from disk, packing SA...
Feb 27 10:28:30 ... finished generating suffix array
Feb 27 10:28:30 ... generating Suffix Array index
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc


Searches for the GNU/Linux error lead to some pages about C++ that I don't understand. 

Submitting it as a batch job works fine but I would like to know why it does not work on a node. It is quite practical for me to test small code like this without submitting a batch job.

The command above works fine on my laptop running Mac OSX.

The STAR version is STAR_2.5.3a on both computers: STAR_2.5.3a

The memory usage of the node is the following:

total            used       free     shared    buffers       cached

251              251         0         0       0             232


so, is there 0 memory for me to use on this node?

Why is my indexing aborting?
A std::bad_alloc error tends to mean that you've run out of memory. It's not unusual for head nodes to be fairly limited in capacity, so presumably that's the issue.