Solutions to Barracuda Problems

error while loading shared libraries: libcudart.so.6.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Barracuda needs the CUDA run time libraries.

Work around

Add the location of the missing run time libraries to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH. E.g. in tcsh something like:
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH":/usr/local/cuda/lib64/

[aln_core] CUDA ERROR(s) reported during first kernel run! Last CUDA error message: the launch timed out and was terminated

Did you connect your console to the GPU you are using with Barracuda and run windows on the console?

The barracuda's kernels take a long time to complete. Often far longer than the X-11 windowing system is expecting. It may be that the windowing system has timed out and aborted one of barracuda's kernels.

Work around

You will probably need to dedicate the GPU you are using to accelerate BarraCUDA to just running as a GPGPU device.
Can you plug your console into another video port on your computer?
Can you avoid running X-11 on your console?
Can you (greatly) increase the timeout?

[aln_core] CUDA ERROR(s) reported during width/bid preparation! Last CUDA error message: an illegal memory access was encountered

Did you try and use 0.6 index with Barracuda version 0.7.0 or later?

Work around

Rebuild your index files. See BWA work around.

CUDA ERROR(s) reported during split kernel run! Last CUDA error message: an illegal memory access was encountered

This error may be reported by query sequences which exceed 100 bp. However, e.g. on other hardware, the error may not be reported or may be trapped at a different point in the code giving a slightly different error message.

Work around

Remove or truncate sequences longer than 100 ACGT base characters from the DNA query input file.
For example, you might replace a long query sequence with one or more of its subsequences each of ≤100 bp.

Error now trapped and properly reported. (The fix is included in barracuda 0.7.107c).

The aln option works best with short sequences. There is a configurable internal limit MAX_SEQUENCE_LENGTH of 100bp. If you edit #define MAX_SEQUENCE_LENGTH you will need to run make again. (First clear the linux/ and linux/objs/ directories.) If you make large changes to MAX_SEQUENCE_LENGTH you need to double check the GPU does not run out of memory.

[barracuda_read_seq] Sequence nnnBP truncated to 150

This is a warning introduced in version 0.7.107d. With barracuda 0.7.107c and earlier, reads that were too long would cause barracuda to stop. This warning means over long sequences are truncated to the limit but barracuda aln continues. In BarraCUDA 0.7.105 to 0.7.107c the limit was 100 base pairs.

Work around

Alignment using just the first 150BP is often sufficient. If not, see the description of limit MAX_SEQUENCE_LENGTH above.

Noisy reads more than 127bp fail to match

Applies to version 0.7.107d (fixed in 0.7.107e). Sometimes mismatches at the end of the read will cause the read to be rejected and so no match for the read is reported.

Work around

Problem cannot arise with reads less than 127 base pairs. Fixed in 0.7.107e.

[bns_restore_core] fail to open file 'indexes/ucsc.hg19.nt.ann'. Abort!

Did you give a DNA sequence fasta file on the command line where you should have given a .sai file (e.g. a SAI file produced by barracuda aln).

BarraCUDA's command line pretty much follows that of BWA.

Usage:   barracuda sampe [options] <prefix> <in1.sai> <in2.sai> <in1.fq> <in2.fq>

Work around

Double check command line.

sampe_core no Running with threads

When you run barracuda sampe you do not get a status message like:
[sampe_core] Running with 8 threads
Similarly does barracuda ignore the -t command line option?

This may be caused by building barracuda without HAVE_PTHREAD. Which may in turn be because your system does not support posix threads or perhaps you got a message like:

/bin/sh: ldconfig: command not found
when you compiled BarraCUDA?

Work around

If caused by missing ldconfig, then add ldconfig to your path and rebuild barracuda. E.g.
setenv PATH "$PATH":/sbin
make
Before using make you will need to remove the existing version and its object files (see subdirectory linux/release/). Check -DHAVE_PTHREAD was used when compiling each file. Check sampe does indeed produce a "Running with n threads" message.

Note barracuda can still override -t on your command line as it limits the number of host threads to the number of CPUs the host computer has.

Barracuda sampe running with 8 threads

On a multi core server by default barracuda sampe will run with up to eight host threads.

Work around

If your server has more than 8 CPUs you can use the -t argument to tell barracuda to use more than 8 host threads.

[aln_core] Error binding "bwt_src" to bwt_cuda constant.

invalid device symbol

Are you trying to use Barracuda on a pre 3.5 GPU?

By default Barracuda is compiled with instructions from compute level 3.5. These instructions will not run on GPUs with compute level lower than 3.5.

GPUs older than 2.0 are not supported. See also next error.

Work arounds

For GPUs between 2.0 and 3.5 recompile with the appropriate -arch I.e. set environment variable Arch to sm_20 remove previous image and object files and re-run make.

Use more recent GPU.

[aln_core] Not enough memory to perform alignment (min: 675 MB).

Barracuda aln needs 675 megabytes (ideally more) plus the space taken by the reference genome on the GPU card. This error message means that barracuda is saying after loading the compressed reference genome on to the GPU it does not have that much left free RAM on the GPU.

Work arounds

Most modern GPUs should have enough on board memory. There are a number of nVidia tools, e.g. deviceQuery, which show GPU characteristics such as total amount of global memory. nvidia-smi may show actual current usage.

Is anyone else using the GPU?

Barracuda sampe hangs

Sometimes barracuda sampe may get as far as
[sampe_core] Converting SA /tmp/ERR242845_1.200k.sai /tmp/ERR242845_2.200k.sai to linear sequence coordinates, please wait... 
[sampe_core] .
and appears to stop. Typically everything is fine, sampe is simply doing a lot of work and it will eventually move on.

It may be that sampe needs more RAM than your machine has, in which case it may be taking a very long time as your operating system tries to find more memory for sampe to run. This is often futile and the only realistic situation is to find a computer with more RAM.

It appears occasionally sampe really gets stuck in a loop.

Work arounds

First check that sampe is really not going to complete. Even on modest size problems, this step may easily take several minutes.

Check that there is enough memory. Even for less than a million reads and the full human reference genome, you may need more than 6 Gigabytes.

Let me know if you hit this problem.
example

Epigenetics and GeForce GTX 1080
[aln_core] CUDA ERROR(s) reported during first kernel run! Last CUDA error message: out of memory [aln_core] Abort!

Under certain unusual circumstances the calculation of buffer size assumes there is more space left on the GPU than there really is so setting buffer to be too big. This causes the GPU to run out of memory leading to the above error message.

Work around

Fixed by release 0.7.107h

Very old GPUs
[aln_core] CUDA ERROR(s) reported during first kernel run! Last CUDA error message: out of memory [aln_core] Abort!

Did you compile Barracuda with SM_VERSIONS = sm_13 or less?

No work around

Barracuda is not supported on compute level 1.3 or earlier GPUs.
(Hint try reducing buffer to 21 and blocksize to 64. But note a pre compute level 2.0 GPU is bound to be slow.)

No matches found in tiny reference genome

Up to 0.7.107 BarraCUDA stopped immediately on genomes whose BWT table was less than 1048576 bytes without reporting an error.

Work around

Fix incorporated into version 0.7.107a barracuda_0.7.107a.tar.gz

cuda.cuh:323: unsigned int __global_bwt(unsigned int *, int, int, int *, uint4 *, uint4 *, uint4 *, uint4 *): block: [46,0,0], thread: [47,0,0] Assertion `!(base<0 || base >= 775451201)` failed.

[aln_core] CUDA ERROR(s) reported during width/bid preparation! Last CUDA error message: device-side assert triggered [aln_core] Abort!

Caused by debug code being too sensitive to size of reference genome.

Work around

The problem was fixed in barracuda_0.7.107.
Please use the newer version of Barracuda.

/lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by linux/release/barracuda)

Probably due to different versions of the GNU C library on the Linux host computer you are using now compared to the one you used to compile and link the barracuda program.

Work around

Perhaps the easiest is to compile again, e.g. using:

make clean
make
on your new computer.

It may be there is already a compatible version of file libc.so.6 on your computer and appropriate use of path and or environment variables will enable the operating system to find and use it when you start barracuda.

0.6.2 beta [infer_isize] inferred maximum insert size: Segmentation fault

Work around

The problem appears to have been fixed in barracuda_0.7.105a
Please use the newer version of Barracuda.

Alternatively disable multiple host threads when running sampe using sampe -t 1

Undefined reference to `bwt_2occ4' `bwtl_2occ4' `bwt_2occ'

BarraCUDA 0.7.107e make fails on Ubuntu 16.04.1 with gcc version 5.4.0. It appears the new version of the GCC compiler has a stricter definition of C++ and is rejecting source code which earlier versions of gcc compiled without problem.

Work around

Fixed in barracuda release 0.7.107f

Small indexes and large number of mismatches aln -n

There seems to be a problem when the number of difference between the read sequence and the index is very large on very small indexes (e.g. the index contains less than 1000 bases). In regular NGS cases aln -n is fine but in such special cases there is a problem when the integer given with -n greatly exceeds 2, in that far fewer matches are reported than would be expected.

The problem also occurs in BWA (version 0.7.12-r1039).

Work around

Cause and cure are unknown.

Variation in results between different runs on the same data

Where there are many potential matches, the exact details of those reported by BarraCUDA may be different from those reported by BWA.

Cause


Epigenetics and Barracuda

Help with aligning bisulfite sequencing methylation data with barracuda

See seqbarracuda-meth documentation by Albert Vilella.

[aln_local_core] Potential bug: (206,223) > 170

Long story short, it's not a bug.

Work around

Simply ignore this and similar informational messages.


W.B.Langdon Back 29 October 2014 (last update 26 September 2017)