SAS^® Grid Computing

Features

Grid-enabled SAS®

• SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS® Enterprise Miner™ are automatically tailored for parallel processing and job submission in a grid environment.
• SAS Code Analyzer can analyze job dependencies in SAS programs and generate grid-ready code.
• Provides automated session spawning and distributed processing of SAS programs across a set of diverse computing resources.
• Speeds up processing of applicable SAS programs and applications, and provides more efficient computing resource utilization.
• Enables scheduling of production SAS workflows to be executed across grid resources.
• Many SAS solutions and user-written programs can be easily configured for submission to a grid of shared resources.
• Grid-enabled SAS logic can be saved as a SAS Stored Process, which can then be used by all SAS Business Intelligence clients and analytic applications.
• Provides greater resilience for mission-critical applications and high availability for the SAS environment.
• SAS Grid Manager includes the Platform Suite for SAS from Platform Computing and can be used by customers who have an existing grid using DataSynapse GridServer or Univa UD Grid MP.
  

Managed, shared environment

• Improves efficiency of program distribution and CPU utilization through dynamic, resource-based load balancing.
• Makes computing resources available to multiple users and multiple applications for running larger or more complex analysis.
• Provides job, queue, host and user management across your enterprise.
• Enables job prioritization by rules-based job queues to govern the use of computing resources.
• Provides automatic identification, allocation, management and optimization of computing resources and program flows.

High availability

• Included with SAS Grid Manager as part of the Platform Suite for SAS 4.1.
• Provides high-availability capabilities for critical SAS services such as the SAS Metadata Server.
• Grid node serves as a hot-standby machine for failover.
• Available on all operating systems supported by SAS Grid Manager.
• Detects hardware and software failures in the grid and recovers appropriately.
• Ensures that SAS jobs will be completed optimally.
• When used with the SAS checkpoint/restart feature, jobs can be automatically restarted from the last successful checkpoint.

Real-time monitoring and administration

• Integration with the platform for SAS Business Analytics via the SAS Management Console provides enterprise-class grid computing infrastructure administration and management.
• The Grid Manager plug-in (in the SAS Management Console) provides a visual interface to monitor and manage hosts, jobs, users and queues in the SAS computing grid.
• Provides real-time monitoring of programs and computing resources.
• Manages multiple grids.
• Resource and activity information can be filtered, allowing users to focus on specific aspects of grid operations.
• Provides metadata-driven management.

Flexible infrastructure

• Lets you cost-effectively grow your computing resources incrementally to meet growing numbers of users as well as increased business needs.
• Decouples the computing infrastructure from the SAS applications to allow business users to focus on their processes.
• Creates a shared environment to easily and dynamically allocate resources to meet peak needs of different business users over time.
• Eases maintenance of infrastructure by allowing machines to be taken offline without disrupting the business.
• Improves price and performance through the use of commodity hardware.