North Bridge Disconnect?

[Thomas Dineen]

Gentle People:

I am developing an optimization application that uses the CPU quite 
intensely
for long periods of time on a CentOS  6.9 machine. Some test runs can 
run for hours or even days.
On a particular test the the OS crashes to a black screen with the 
message "North Bridge Disconnected"
printed in the upper left.

The application is carefully designed to not simply consume too much 
memory and run out, and observation
of the System Monitor confirms this.

What could be  the cause? Is this a bug in my code, quite possible 
given the fact that I an still testing and debugging?
Can a bug in a user application get into Kernel space and crash the machine?
Or is it likely a hardware problem on the Motherboard?

Thomas Dineen