title | author | date | duration |
---|---|---|---|
Quality control using FASTQC - script running |
Mary Piper, Radhika Khetani, Meeta Mistry, Jihe Liu |
Friday, October 30, 2020 |
45 minutes |
- Create and run a SLURM job submission script to automate quality assessment
So far in our FASTQC analysis, we have been directly submitting commands to O2 using an interactive session (ie. srun --pty -c 6 -p interactive -t 0-12:00 --mem 6G --reservation=HBC /bin/bash
). However, there are many more partitions available on O2 than just the interactive partition. We can submit a command or series of commands to these partitions using job submission scripts.
Job submission scripts for O2 are just regular shell scripts, but contain the Slurm options/directives for our job submission. These directives define the various resources we are requesting for our job (i.e number of cores, name of partition, runtime limit )
Submission of the script using the sbatch
command allows Slurm to run your job when its your turn. Let's create a job submission script to automate what we have done in previous lesson.
Our script will do the following:
- Change directories to where the FASTQ files are located
- Load the FastQC module
- Run FastQC on all of our FASTQ files
Let's first change the directory to ~/rnaseq/scripts
, and create a script named mov10_fastqc.run
using vim
.
$ cd ~/rnaseq/scripts
$ vim mov10_fastqc.run
Once in the vim editor, click i
to enter INSERT mode. The first thing we need in our script is the shebang line:
#!/bin/bash
Following the shebang line are the Slurm directives. For the script to run, we need to include options for queue/partition (-p) and runtime limit (-t). To specify our options, we precede the option with #SBATCH
. Some key resources to specify are:
Resource | Flag | Description |
---|---|---|
partition | -p | partition name |
time | -t | hours:minutes run limit, after which the job will be killed |
core | -c | number of cores requested -- this needs to be greater than or equal to the number of cores you plan to use to run your job |
memory | --mem | memory limit per compute node for the job |
Let's specify those options as follows:
#SBATCH -p short # partition name
#SBATCH -t 0-2:00 # time limit
#SBATCH -c 6 # number of cores
#SBATCH --mem 6G # requested memory
#SBATCH --job-name rnaseq_mov10_fastqc # Job name
#SBATCH -o %j.out # File to which standard output will be written
#SBATCH -e %j.err # File to which standard error will be written
Now in the body of the script, we can include any commands we want to run. In this case, it will be the following:
## Change directories to where the fastq files are located
cd ~/rnaseq/raw_data
## Load modules required for script commands
module load fastqc/0.12.1
## Run FASTQC
fastqc -o ~/rnaseq/results/fastqc/ -t 6 *.fq
NOTE: These are the same commands we used when running FASTQC in the interactive session. Since we are writing them in a script, the
tab
completion function will not work, so please make sure you don't have any typos when writing the script!
Once done with your script, click esc
to exit the INSERT mode. Then save and quit the script by typing :wq
. You may double check your script by typing less mov10_fastqc.run
. If everything looks good submit the job!
$ sbatch mov10_fastqc.run
You should immediately see a prompt saying Submitted batch job JobID
. Your job is assigned with that unique identifier JobID
. You can check on the status of your job with:
$ O2sacct
Look for the row that corresponds to your JobID
. The third column indicates the state of your job. Possible states include PENDING
, RUNNING
, COMPLETED
. Once your job state is RUNNING
, you should expect it to finish in less than two minutes. When the state is COMPLETED
, that means your job is finished.
NOTE: Other helpful options for checking/managing jobs are available as a cheatsheet from HMS-RC.
Check out the output files in your directory:
$ ls -lh ../results/fastqc/
There should also be one standard error (.err
) and one standard out (.out
) files from the job listed in ~/rnaseq/scripts
. You can move these over to your logs
directory and give them more intuitive names:
$ mv *.err ../logs/fastqc.err
$ mv *.out ../logs/fastqc.out
NOTE: The
.err
and.out
files store log information during the script running. They are helpful resources, especially when your script does not run as expected and you need to troubleshoot the script.
Exercise
- Take a look at what's inside the
.err
and.out
files. What do you observe? Do you remember where you see those information when using the interactive session? - How would you change the
mov10_fastqc.run
script if you had 9 fastq files you wanted to run in parallel?
This lesson has been developed by members of the teaching team at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core (HBC). These are open access materials distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- The materials used in this lesson was derived from work that is Copyright © Data Carpentry (http://datacarpentry.org/). All Data Carpentry instructional material is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0).