Learning Objectives:

Quality Control of FASTQ files

Performing quality assessment using job submission scripts

So far in our FASTQC analysis, we have been directly submitting commands to FAS-RC using an interactive session (ie. salloc -p test -t 0-6:00 --mem 6G -c 6). However, there are many more partitions available on FAS-RC 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 FAS-RC 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:

  1. Change directories to where the FASTQ files are located
  2. Load the FastQC module
  3. 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 Option 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 shared 		# 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/0.11.8-fasrc01

## 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:

$ sacct

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 FAS-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

  1. 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?
  2. How would you change the mov10_fastqc.run script if you had 9 fastq files you wanted to run in parallel?
  3. Write out your answers in a text file and upload to the DropBox link on the schedule page.

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.