Using Compute Services

Overview of Compute Services

SAS/CONNECT Compute Services provides a set of statements and commands that enable the client to distribute SAS processing to one or more server sessions and to maintain control of these server sessions and their results from the single client session. This very powerful capability enables you to run SAS across many (possibly heterogeneous) platforms as well as communicate between different releases of SAS that might be installed on these operating environments.

The RSUBMIT statement or command is used to direct SAS processing to a specific server session. For details, see Syntax for the RSUBMIT Statement and Command.

Here are some of the benefits of Compute Services:

gives you access to additional CPU resources.

You might have multiprocessor SMP computers or remote computers on your network that are underutilized. These CPUs could be used to execute the CPU intensive portions of your application faster and more efficiently than your local computer. Compute Services enables you to move some or all segments of an application to one or more server sessions for execution and return the results to the client session.
lets you execute the application on the computer where the data resides.

Data center rules or data characteristics might mandate a single, centralized copy of the data that is needed by your application. Moving the processing to the computer where the data resides eliminates the need to transfer or create additional copies of the data. Using only one copy of data can satisfy security requirements as well as enable access to data sources that are too large or too dynamic for transfer.

For example, although data links between computers make file transfers convenient and easy, large files do not move quickly between computers. It is also inefficient to maintain multiple copies of large files when developing and testing programs that are designed to process those files. Compute Services overcomes this limitation by developing applications on one computer while running them and keeping the data that they use on a different computer.

To test your application, submit it remotely from the client session so that it will run in the server session on a remote computer. All processing occurs on the computer where the data resides, but the output appears in the client session.

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