I was working with someone yesterday with the same problem.  He has I7 3.6gh 4 core (8 with virtual) and 8g ram and a very light scene.  Rendered fine at 800x600x72.  We went to 7200x5400x72 and it rendered the sss precalc just fine then started the final render and terminated about 20 percent into the render.  We set the size in half to 3600x2700 and same thing.  I was on the phone so I couldn't see it directly.

I have 2012 so I don't have these issues. 

Any ideas would be appreciated.  I'll have him set to separate process and clean up the system a bit first too.  Not sure why P9 on his system would be incapable of handling that size.