SAS Grid Computing

What is SAS Grid Computing? SAS Grid Computing delivers enterprise-class grid computing capabilities that enable SAS applications to automatically leverage grid computing, run faster and take optimal advantage of computing resources. SAS Grid Manager helps automate the management of SAS Computing Grids with dynamic load balancing, resource assignment and monitoring, and job priority and termination management.

Why is SAS Grid Computing important? Customers can process high-volume SAS programs faster, improve hardware utilization and future proof computing infrastructures while increasing the resilience of SAS applications. Computing resources can be scaled out to cost-effectively add new users and meet fluctuating processing demands.

For whom is SAS Grid Computing designed? It is designed for CIOs, IT managers, data center managers or grid computing architects seeking to improve performance of SAS jobs and optimize use of all appropriate resources. It also can be used by statisticians, analysts, data miners, application developers, DBAs and others seeking to reduce SAS processing time for faster data integration and analytic results.

Key Benefits

Increase hardware ROI and improve efficiency by fully exploiting existing computing resources. SAS Grid Manager allows organizations to fully utilize all computing resources in the most efficient manner. With a comprehensive set of advanced load balancing and grid management functionality, it automates the management and optimization of application processing in a grid computing environment.
Speed up applications using existing IT infrastructure. Multiprocessing capabilities allow work flows to be processed in parallel on multiple machines. By using multiple CPUs, each running a part of a program with its own hardware resources, the time required to execute a SAS program is reduced substantially. Analytical and data integration processes will yield faster results, accelerating decision making across the enterprise.
Future proof and increase flexibility of enterprise computing infrastructure by scaling out. Using grid technology, SAS applications can be cost-effectively scaled out, adding capacity in single processing units for incremental IT spend. This reduces processing time as well as capital expenditures on ever-larger, stand-alone servers.

Key Features

Grid-enabled SAS. SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner 5.2 are the first SAS products that are tailored for parallel processing in a grid computing environment. To achieve maximum processing efficiency with minimum user intervention, these programs detect the grid environment at the time of execution. Not only does this speed results for these particular applications, the grid-enabled logic that is produced can be saved as a SAS Stored Process for use by other SAS BI clients to produce faster results for more users as cost-effectively as possible.
Automatic grid management and monitoring. The Grid Manager plug-in, which is integrated into the SAS Management Console, provides a visual interface for monitoring and managing hosts, jobs, users and queues in the SAS Computing Grid. Resource and activity information can be filtered allowing users to focus on specific aspects of grid operations. Additionally, the Grid Manager provides job priority management and termination.
Dynamic resource-based load balancing. By incorporating proven industry-leading grid computing middleware from Platform Computing, SAS Grid Computing delivers enterprise-class dynamic load balancing. This automates the management of SAS grids and provides execution resilience by efficiently distributing the processing of SAS programs across multiple CPUs.

For a complete list of key benefits and features, refer to the SAS Grid Computing Fact Sheet.

SAS Grid Computing Diagram

SAS Grid Computing creates a managed, flexible and shared SAS environment to efficiently process multiple user workloads, parallel workloads and enterprise scheduling. SAS Grid Computing integrates with Platform Computing middleware to provide load balancing, policy enforcement, efficient resource allocation and prioritization for SAS products and solutions running in a shared grid environment. Hosts, users and jobs are monitored and tracked within the Grid Manager plug-in to the SAS Management Console.

SAS Grid Computing

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