BWA terminated by SIGKILL, PALEOMIX in BAM pipline about paleomix HOT 2 CLOSED

Hi Uri,

Your yaml file looks fine to me.

The problem is, as you point out, that the first process was terminated by SIGKILL and as a consequence, the pipeline automatically terminated the second process. That generally indicates that it was killed by an external process rather than due to a problem with the software (bwa) or with the pipeline.

I don't know the system your are running the pipeline on, but it's possible that the processed got killed due to excessive memory usage. Either by the task management system (Torque, PBS, Slurm), if you are using one such, or earlyoom/the kernel OOM killer.

If so then you can possibly find an explanation in the output from dmesg or in /var/log/messages or in the task status or log for your task management system.

If that is the explanation, the BWA manual page states that

For short reads, the aln command uses ~3.2GB memory and the sampe command uses ~5.4GB.

If that is the cause, then you could decrease the maximum number of threads used by the pipeline (via --max-threads) to prevent too many instances running at once. Or you could try reserving more memory if you are using a task management system.

Best regards,
Mikkel

from paleomix.

Thank you for the detailed response.
It indeed was an issue with memory usage during the run. By running on a different server we achieved good results with no errors, and w/o changing the yaml file. Closing this session as resolved.

from paleomix.