SAS^® Grid Computing

Features

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.
• 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.
• Simplifies administration of SAS environment through centralized policies.

Grid-enabled SAS

• SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS^® Enterprise Miner™ are automatically tailored for parallel processing and job submission in a grid environment:
  • Balances the load of many SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® users through easy submission to the grid.
  • Provides load balancing for all SAS servers to improve throughput and response time of all SAS clients.
• SAS Code Analyzer analyzes job dependencies in SAS programs and generates grid-ready code:
  • Used by SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide to import SAS programs.
• 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:
  • Provides a process flow diagram to create SAS flows of one or more SAS jobs that can be simple or complex to meet your needs.
  • Uses all of the policies and resources of the grid.
• 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 SAS Stored Processes, 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.
• Includes command-line batch submission utility called SASGSUB:
  • Allows you to submit and forget, and reconnect later to retrieve results.
• Enables batch submission to leverage checkpoints and automatically restart jobs.

Real-time monitoring and administration

• Platform RTM for SAS allows you to monitor and manage SAS Grid Computing:
  • Web-based tool enables you to monitor and administer multiple SAS grids.
  • Monitor and administer your grids from any location, as long as you have access to a Web browser.
  • Graphs to track resource usage, users and jobs running on the grid.
  • GUI to modify grid configurations and define alerts when critical thresholds are crossed.
  • GUI to configure and manage your critical services for high availability.
  • Supports filtering and role definitions to customize displays and activities that can be performed.
• Grid manager plug-in provides monitoring capabilities from SAS Management Console:
  • Provides real-time monitoring of SAS programs and computing resources.
  • Resource and activity information can be filtered, allowing users to focus on specific aspects of grid operations.
  • Provides graphical representation of job distribution.

Flexible infrastructure

• Lets you cost-effectively add computing resources incrementally to meet a 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.