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If you happen to see a question you know the answer to, please do chime in and help your fellow community members. We encourage our fourm members to be more involved, jump in and help out your fellow researchers with their questions. GATK forum is a community forum and helping each other with using GATK tools and research is the cornerstone of our success as a genomics research community.We appreciate your help!
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Is the parallelism documentation for DepthOfCoverage correct?

http://www.broadinstitute.org/gatk/gatkdocs/org_broadinstitute_sting_gatk_walkers_coverage_DepthOfCoverage.html
states (bold is my emphasis):
Parallelism options
This tool can be run in multi-threaded mode using this option.
TreeReducible (-nt)
Yet when I run the GATK with -nt
, I get an error that -nt
is not supported (truncated to save space):
ERROR A USER ERROR has occurred (version 2.8-1-g932cd3a):
ERROR MESSAGE: Invalid command line: Argument nt has a bad value: The analysis DepthOfCoverage aggregates results by interval. Due to a current limitation of the GATK, analyses of this type do not currently support parallel execution. Please run your analysis without the -nt option.
Tagged:
Answers
Apologies for the poor markdown
No worries. We'll improve the error message on this for the next version; the issue is that by default, the tool produces a summary of data aggregated over intervals, which is not compatible with multithreading. However, if you disable the per-interval reporting (see -omitIntervalStatistics ifI remember correctly), you will be able to use the multithreading.
--omitIntervalStatistics got rid of the error. Thanks!
So, what is the max memory that could be allocated to depthOfCoverage
I use -Xmx2G.....I use the older GATK version GenomeAnalysisTK-1.6-13, hence cannot use multithreading option, i,.e -nt
But if I go more that 2G on the -Xmx value then I think it wont make any difference..correct?
Hi @Shrey_S,
I would say that's correct, yes -- I wouldn't expect memory to be the limiting factor for DepthOfCoverage, so increasing the allocation won't make it go faster, unfortunately.
So that means if I use -Xmx6G it would still use 2G which is the max it could use...
Is 2G the standard max memory for all the GATK tools (i.e. if we run them without multithreading)?
No, I mean you can allocate more, and if it needs to it could potentially use the extra memory (there is no hard limit set internally for any tool), but it is unlikely that the tool would need that much memory.
Alright Geraldine..Thanks for the reply....:)