well, I guess you have other stuff running on your laptop which are using some memory.
Try to monitor the memory usage the with
command (or any other tool you like), before and while the job is running to see how much memory you are actually using.
Probably it is better if you start with 2-4 MPI processes.
Also,
you actually have 4 cores and 8 threads. You should achieve the best performance by disabling OpenMP threading and only using MPI parallelization with 4 cores.
Run:
export MKL_NUM_THREADS=1
export MKL_DYNAMIC=FALSE
mpiexec -n 4 /home/wise/QuantumWise/VNL-ATK-2014.0/bin/atkpython test.py > test.log
Please, do some tests with different number of MPI processes and with and without OMP threading to find out the optimal set-up for your machine.
Check also the Parallel guide here http://quantumwise.com/support/manuals
EDIT: from ATK 2014 version also OMP should be disabled:
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
export OMP_DYNAMIC=FALSE