Distributed mode is a computing model in which several nodes in a distributed computing environment participate in the calculations. In this book, the distributed mode of a high-performance analytical procedure refers to the procedure performing the analytics on an appliance that consists of a cluster of nodes. This appliance can be one of the following:
a database management system (DBMS) appliance on which the SAS High-Performance Analytics infrastructure is also installed
a cluster of nodes that have the SAS High-Performance Analytics infrastructure installed but no DBMS software installed