Skip to content

RAxML

RAxML is a fast program for the inference of phylogenies with maximum likelihood method. RAxML offers several evolutionary models for both DNA and amino acid sequences.

License

Free to use and open source under GNU GPLv3.

Available

  • Puhti: 8.2.12

Usage

To see the installed RAxML versions, use the command:

module spider raxml

To see the requirements for a specific version, use:

module spider raxml/<version>

e.g:

module spider raxml/8.2.12

Then load the required modules. For example, for version 8.2.12:

module load raxml/8.2.12

Which version to use?

RAxML comes in a serial version and three different parallel versions.

The serial version (raxmlHPC) is intended for small to medium datasets and for initial experiments to determine appropriate search parameters.

The PThreads version (raxmlHPC-PTHREADS) will work well for very long alignments. Make sure to specify the number of threads with the ­-T option. This should match the number of cores you request in the batch job script.

To choose the number of threads to use, please see section "How many Threads shall I use?" in the RAxML manual. Using too many threads can cause the program to run slower.

The MPI version (raxmlHPC-MPI) is for executing really large production runs (i.e. 100 or 1,000 bootstraps). You can also perform multiple inferences on larger data sets in parallel to find a best-known ML tree for your data set. Finally, the rapid BS algorithm and the associated ML search have also been parallelized with MPI.

The current MPI version only works properly if you specify the number of runs in the command line, since it has been designed to do multiple inferences or rapid/standard BS (bootstrap) searches in parallel. For all remaining options, the usage of this type of coarse-grained parallelism does not make much sense. Please use the -N option instead of the -# option as the latter can be mistaken for a start of a comment by the batch job system.

For versions 8.2.12 and newer there is also a hybrid MPI/threaded version (raxmlHPC-HYBRID)

For versions 8.2.12 and newer there are also AVX-optimized binaries available (raxmlHPC-AVX, raxmlHPC-PTHREADS-AVX, raxmlHPC-MPI-AVX, raxmlHPC-HYBRID-AVX). These can run faster that non-optimized versions, but can cause problems on some datasets. Try the non-optimized versions in case of problems.

For details, please refer to the chapter "When to use which Version?" in the RAxML manual.

Example batch job scripts

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --account=project_1234567
#SBATCH --job-name=raxml_threads
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=4
#SBATCH --mem=8G
#SBATCH --time=10:00:00
#SBATCH --partition=small

module load raxml/8.2.12
raxmlHPC-PTHREADS -T $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK ­-s alg -­m GTRGAMMA ­-p 12345 ­-n test1

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --account=project_1234567
#SBATCH --job-name=raxml_mpi
#SBATCH --ntasks=100
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --mem-per-cpu=8G
#SBATCH --time=10:00:00
#SBATCH --partition=large

module load raxml/8.2.12
srun raxmlHPC-MPI -N 100 -s cox1.phy -m GTRGAMMAI -p 12345 -n test2

More information