Determine Input and Output File Locations

The DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform is very fast, which requires careful planning for the locations of the input and output files. If the input or output files are on a slow file system, then the overall performance of the system is limited by the throughput of that file system. It is recommended that inputs and outputs are streamed directly from/to a mounted external storage system.

The DRAGEN system is preconfigured with at least one fast file system consisting of a set of fast SSD disks grouped with RAID-0 for performance. This file system is mounted at /staging. This name was chosen to emphasize the fact that this area was built to be large and fast, but is not redundant. Failure of any of the file system's constituent disks leads to the loss of all data stored there.

During processing, DRAGEN generates and reads back temporary files. With DRAGEN, it is highly recommended to always direct temporary files to the fast SSD (or /staging) by using the --intermediate-results-dir option. If the --intermediate-results-dir option is not provided, temporary files are written to the --output-directory. DRAGEN recommends streaming inputs and outputs using an mounted external storage system.