SRA

Description

This is the NCBI Short Read Archive Toolkit.

Note: sra will create a $HOME/ncib/public directory and cache the prefetched data files there. However, home directory has a 20gb limit and its use for job data storage is a violation of the UFRC storage policy. You must change that location to a directory in your ufrc space before running the sra toolkit. The official approach is to use the vdb-config tool

vdb-config -i

and change the directory to, for example, /blue/$GROUP/$USER/ncbi/public. See the SRA Toolkit Configuration Documentation for more details.

Alternatively, create an 'ncbi' directory in your /blue space and symlink it to ~/ncbi. E.g.

$ mkdir /blue/mygroup/$USER/ncbi
$ ln -s /blue/mygroup/$USER/ncbi ~/ncbi

Uploads

It appears that data uploads to NCBI only work from login servers. Start a screen session before beginning an upload if there are any concerns about being disconnected.

Environment Modules

Run module spider sra to find out what environment modules are available for this application.

System Variables

HPC_SRA_DIR - installation directory
HPC_SRA_BIN - location of the executables directory
HPC_SRA_DOC - location of the documentation directory

Additional Information

Aspera Connect

To download SRA data you can use the "ascp" utility from the Aspera Connect browser plugin package. We have a copy installed and provided by the sra module. A wrapper script ascp.sh that automatically uses the ssh key is available. For instance:

ascp.sh -QT anonftp@ftp-private.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:/genomes/Bacteria/all.faa.tar.gz faa

will download the all.faa.tar.gz archive to the faa directory.

Note: if the download fails to run with a "Session Stop (Error: Client unable to connect to server (check UDP port and firewall))" error please submit a support request. This means that the remote site has not been allowed through the firewall. Please be sure to include the path to a script you used to run the data transfer command into the request. Do not put any sensitive information like passwords, keys, and such into the request.

SRA