exit status 137 / OOMKilled

The process was killed from outside for using too much memory

why

137 is 128 + 9, meaning SIGKILL. In practice that is nearly always the kernel's OOM killer or a container/scheduler memory limit — not a bug in your data or command. The tool's own output explains nothing because it was never given the chance.

what to do

Raise the memory for that specific step rather than the whole run: the memory directive for that Nextflow process, resources: mem_mb in Snakemake, --memory for Docker, or your scheduler's request. If it dies at the same input regardless of the limit, look at what is unusual about that input.

POSIX signal behaviour, canonical
This is one entry from BioErrors, a catalogue of bioinformatics error messages that point at the wrong thing. Every entry was traced to its real cause before it was written down.
If your error is not in it, paste it there and it gets traced and added.