System Requirements Overview :: SAS(R) Enterprise Miner(TM) 12.3: Administration and Configuration, Second Edition

Overview

The following system requirements are generalized estimates for SAS Enterprise Miner. For a more accurate description of the requirements for your specific system and software use the documentation found at http://support.sas.com/resources/sysreq.

Hard Disk Space

The SAS Enterprise Miner server installation uses approximately 23 GB of hard disk space. The SAS Enterprise Miner client installation uses approximately 2 GB of hard disk space. The SAS Enterprise Miner Workstation installation uses approximately 4 GB of hard disk space.

Disk space requirements for data should be analyzed for both the client and server machines.

In addition to the amount of disk space needed to install SAS Enterprise Miner, you will need adequate disk space to store the following:

the data to be mined. You must provide space for the source data, whether it is SAS data sets or RDBMS tables.
the work data that is generated during SAS Enterprise Miner processing on the server. A general recommendation is for each project to allow for 4 to 7 times the amount of the data file being analyzed.

The SAS Enterprise Miner Sample, Data Partition, and Memory-Based Reasoning nodes create work files that are as large as the input data files during execution. If your data analyses use these nodes regularly, plan your disk space allocation accordingly.

You should create a detailed assessment of how you expect SAS to interact with your I/O subsystems. You can use this assessment to optimize your I/O throughput. Information about SAS I/O requirements is available at http://support.sas.com/rnd/papers/sgf07/sgf2007-iosubsystem.pdf and http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings10/FAQforStorageConfiguration.pdf.

RAM

The SAS Enterprise Miner server and workstation usually require a minimum of 4 GB of available RAM, plus an additional 2 GB or more for each concurrent client. The minimum recommended configuration for a single user is 4 GB.

The SAS Enterprise Miner client requires a minimum of 2 GB of available RAM.

CPU

In general, you should have one or more CPUs or processor cores available per user. More specifically, if you expect to take advantage of SAS Enterprise Miner’s parallel processing or multithreading capabilities, a minimum of one processor core is required per running node. System performance degrades precipitously when nodes compete for CPU resources. Beyond that, the number of CPUs or processor cores needed to optimize performance for SAS Enterprise Miner on your system is difficult to specify. Factors such as the size of your data, I/O subsystems, the number of concurrent users, the CPU make and model, and your network infrastructure can affect the apparent performance of any system.