Annoying STAR aligner problem

Question

[Biogeek]

Can anyone help?

My commands for star alignment:

./STAR --genomeDir genomedir --readFilesIn all_left_fwd_reads.fastq all_right_rev_reads.fastq --alignIntronMax 25000 --outSAMtype BAM SortedByCoordinate --runThreadN 60 --outBAMsortingThreadN 6 --outFileNamePrefix ALIGNEDREADS_

I keep getting a FATAL ERROR. I am running 250GB with 60 threads. 6 threads for BAM sorting, as i read sorting doesn't work above 6 threads.

Max memory needed for sorting = 9781928623 EXITING because of fatal ERROR: not enough memory for BAM sorting: \ SOLUTION: re-run STAR with at least --limitBAMsortRAM 10781928623 Aug 14 23:18:21 ...... FATAL ERROR, exiting

I've been through this process a few times now. Can anyone provide me with settings that won't make the program crash consistently or point to what's going wrong? My concatenated forward and reverse reads are pretty large files, but it only seems to be when I ask for a bam COORDINATED SORTED FILE.

Any help appreciated.

[Biogeek]

I'm now proceeding with unsorted BAM output, then using SAM tools. Probably quicker anyway?

[Devon Ryan]

I'm guessing that STAR holds everything in memory, as opposed to samtools, which writes temp files. STAR will be faster, but man would it blow up memory requirements.

[Biogeek]

Thanks for the insight! Seems to be running sweet now.