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Grid Computing Papers

The following papers, authored by users and SAS employees, document the many benefits and featurs of SAS Business Analytics and SAS Grid Manager. For additional technical details, please see Documents.

  1. Implementing SAS® Grid Computing in an Analytical Environment (SAS Global Forum 2011 Customer Presentation)
  2. A Survey of Shared File Systems: Determining the Best Choice for Your Distributed Applications
  3. See SAS® in 3-D (SAS Global Forum 2011 Super Demo)
  4. Effectively Implementing SAS® Grid Architectures in Conjunction with Non-Grid-Aware Processes (SAS Global Forum 2011 Presentation)
  5. Considerations for Implementing a Highly Available or Disaster Recovery Environment (SAS Global Forum 2011 Presentation)
  6. Staying Highly Available Using SAS® Grid Manager: The Performance Management
  7. Never Lose a SAS® Job (SAS Global Forum 2010 Super Demo)
  8. Monitor and Track Your SAS® Jobs From Anywhere (SAS Global Forum 2010 Super Demo)
  9. The University of Phoenix Wins Big with SAS® Grid Computing (SAS Global Forum 2009 Customer Presentation)
  10. Business Intelligence on the Grid: A Customer Perspective (SAS Global Forum 2009 Customer Presentation)
  11. Going From Good to Great: The Value of an Analytic Grid Platform at ISO (SAS Global Forum 2009 Customer Presentation)
  12. Achieving High Availability in a SAS® Grid Environment (SAS Global Forum 2009 Partner Presentation)
  13. Analyze This! - What the SAS® Code Analyzer Can Do for You (SAS Global Forum 2009 Super Demo)
  14. See Through the Clouds - SAS and Cloud Computing (SAS Global Forum 2009 Super Demo)
  15. Data Integration in a Grid-Enabled Environment (presented at SAS Global Forum 2009)
  16. Cross-Validation and Learning Curve Model Comparison with JMP® Genomics
  17. Best Practices for Data Sharing in a Grid Distributed SAS® Environment (a SAS White Paper)
  18. SAS® Grid 101: How It Can Modernize Your Existing SAS Environment (presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
  19. Introducing the SAS® Code Analyzer(presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
  20. Balancing the Load - SAS® Server Technologies for Scalability(presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
  21. Archtecting a Finely Tuned SAS® Grid Solution(presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
  22. A Throughput-Intensive Compute and Storage Grid Using SAS® Grid Manager (presented at SAS Global Forum 2007)
  23. Best Practices for Setting Up Computer Hardware in a Grid Environment (presented at SAS Global Forum 2007)
  24. SAS Goes Grid - Managing the Workload Across Your Enterprise (presented at SUGI31)
  25. Advanced Warehousing with SAS®9 (presented at SUGI31)
  26. SAS and Grid Computing - Maximize Efficiency, Lower Total Cost of Ownership (presented at SUGI29)
  27. Multiprocessing with Version 8 of the SAS System
  28. The %Distribute System for Large-Scale Parallel Computation in the SAS System
  29. SAS Parallel Scoring Optimization (white paper)

Implementing SAS® Grid Computing in an Analytical Environment (SAS Global Forum 2011 Customer Presentation)
This paper focuses on the value of implementing SAS Grid in a large analytical environment and uncovers the lessons learned in the course of the Grid implementation. Primary objectives for converting the SAS environment to a Grid with shared file system were to provide a cost effective, readily scalable in-house analytical environment for a rapidly expanding SAS User community that would replace an expensive, externally housed, difficult to upgrade environment that lacked the ability to distribute data across a shared file system..   Available in PDF

A Survey of Shared File Systems: Determining the Best Choice for Your Distributed Applications
This paper examines the behavior of several different shared file systems in the context of performance of a representative SAS Grid Manager deployment..   Available in PDF

See SAS® in 3-D (SAS Global Forum 2011 Super Demo)
Explore the three dimensions required by every SAS Enterprise Business Analytic Environment: workload management, high avaailability and application acceleration. See how SAS Grid Manager can address each of these requirements.    Available in PPS

Effectively Implementing SAS® Grid Architectures in Conjunction with Non-Grid-Aware Processes (SAS Global Forum 2011 Presentation)
This paper presents and discusses a SAS Grid architecture that consist of both grid aware and non-grid aware processes. Available in PDF

Considerations for Implementing a Highly Available or Disaster Recovery Environment (SAS Global Forum 2011 Presentation)
Learn how SAS Grid Manager can play a major role in your organization's high availability and disaster recovery strategy. Available in PDF

Staying Highly Available Using SAS® Grid Manager: The Performance Management Application at Commerzbank AG (SAS Global Forum 2010 Customer Presentation)
All key performance metrics from the bank's main systems are aggregated by Commerzbank's sales management solution for retail banking, dubbed "Performance Manager." New business requirements drove a doubling of the data volumes to be processed and loaded into the application. Facing this requirement, sustaining the scalability of the application while at the same time not extending the load times was the challenge. The solution was to migrate the application to a new architecture, which included SAS Grid Manager 9.2 as well as the SAS Scalable Performance Data Server 4.5.   Available in PDF Presentation available in PPS

Never Lose a SAS® Job (SAS Global Forum 2010 Super Demo)
Would you like to eliminate the experience and frustration of dealing with the failure of a long running job and the need to manually restart that job from the very first step? Learn the best practices around using checkpoing/restart capabilities in your SAS programs to enable a failed job to restart and pick up exectution at the last successful job step. In addition, learn how SAS Grid Manager can automatically detect the failure of a SAS job and re-submit that job to the grid for successful execution on another grid node.    Available in PPS

Monitor and Track Your SAS® Jobs From Anywhere (SAS Global Forum 2010 Super Demo)
Configuration, reporting, alerting and monitoring of SAS jobs are tasks that you deal with whether you are in the office or remote. This demo will illustrate how the web-based Platform RTM for SAS can be used to graphically view the status of devices and services within your SAS Grid environment. It also includes GUI interfaces to allow adminstrators to update the policies and rules in your grid configuration, define alerts as well as set up high availability for any of the services that are critical to the operation of your grid and the applications executing in your grid.    Available in PPS

The University of Phoenix Wins Big with SAS® Grid Computing (SAS Global Forum 2009 Customer Presentation)
The University of Phoenix is the largest private university in North America, offering over 100 degree programs to students across 200 physical campus locations as well as internet-based delivery to serve over 300,000 students on a global basis. Learn why the University of Phoenix selected the SAS® Grid Computing platform powered by Sun Microsystems infrastructure as the technical foundation to meet their data processing and computational requirements for Web analytics, online media optimization, and CRM communications. Understand the benefits of deploying SAS® on a grid architecture for their analytic efforts from student recruiting, services to student retention, and the lessons learned by the University of Phoenix as they rolled out their successful deployment.    Available in PDF

Business Intelligence on the Grid: A Customer Perspective (SAS Global Forum 2009 Customer Presentation)
As part of a continuing effort to increase its capabilities in predictive modeling and analytics, ISO Innovative Analytics is building an "advanced analytics platform." The system centers around SAS Enterprise Miner running in a grid environment. This article discusses the process the company went through in making the software and hardware choices for the new platform and the experience of implementing the platform for a team of more than 30 predictive modelers and analysts.    Available in PDF Presentation available in PPS.

Going From Good to Great: The Value of an Analytic Grid Platform at ISO (SAS Global Forum 2009 Customer Presentation)
As part of a continuing effort to increase its capabilities in predictive modeling and analytics, ISO Innovative Analytics is building an "advanced analytics platform." This presentation covers the tremendous business value that ISO is recognizing with this implementation. The Analytic Grid platform provides a scalable, highly available environment that allows analysts to "fail faster" in order to build better models. In addition, ISO is able to attract top talent by having a state-of-the-art on-demand analytic environment.    Presentation available in PPS.

Achieving High Availability in a SAS® Grid Environment (SAS Global Forum 2009 Partner Presentation)
With increasingly complex analytics, growing data volumes and tightening batch windows, businesses are facing an ever greater need for guaranteed uptime and continuity of services commonly referred to as high availability. At the heart of such a system is resilient infrastructure that provides the architecture for successfully running SAS applications without fail. For SAS applications, this infrastructure is based on SAS Grid Manager -- grid middleware deployed specifically for SAS applications and providing critical services such that all SAS computing tasks running in the grid can be completed optimally. This paper discusses the necessary steps to implement high availability for critical services in a SAS Grid environment using the SAS Metadata Server as an example.   Available in PDF Presentation available in PPS.

Analyze This! - What the SAS® Code Analyzer Can Do for You (SAS Global Forum 2009 Super Demo)
Learn how the SAS Code Analyzer can help you run your existing SAS programs more efficiently. See how easy it is to use the SAS Code Analyzer to create parallel versions of your existing programs to leverage multi-core and distributed grid environments. In addition, the SAS Code Analyzer enables you to import existing SAS programs into SAS Data Integration Studio, automatically registers SAS data sets and libraries in SAS metadata and provides immediate access to all of the features of SAS Data Integration Studio. The SAS Code Analyzer automates these capabilities saving you time and money by eliminating manual processes.    Available in PPS

See Through the Clouds - SAS and Cloud Computing (SAS Global Forum 2009 Super Demo)
Learn the basics of cloud computing and more about the economic and business drivers behind this technology. Also discussed are the benefits of running SAS Business Analytics in a cloud.    Available in PPS

Data Integration in a Grid-Enabled Environment (presented at SAS Global Forum 2009)
SAS® Data Integration Studio combined with SAS® Grid Manager enables use of distributed grid resources for scheduling production jobs, load balancing multiple users and accelerating execution times of long-running tasks. All of these capabilities are available from the point-and-click SAS Data Integration Studio interface eliminating the need for any programming knowledge or knowledge of the computing infrastructure. This paper discusses typical data integration workloads, how to scale them on typical grid computing hardware, and new capabilities including load balancing multiple data integration tasks or users across the grid and using the SAS Code Analyzer to import existing programs into SAS Data Integration Studio.    Available in PDF. Presentation available in PPS.

Cross-Validation and Learning Curve Model Comparison with JMP® Genomics and Grid Computing (presented at SAS Global Forum 2009)
The Food and Drug Administration has challenged researchers to demonstrate whether or not gene expression data can reliably predict future disease. JMP® Genomics responded with a suite of predictive modeling tools suitable for short, fat data. The number of types and subtypes of models that are practical to consider is primarily limited by CPU time. SAS® Grid Manager, in conjunction with JMP Genomics, provides the intelligent allocation of distributed computing resources and parallel application execution necessary to provide more accurate and timely predictive modeling. In this paper, we describe our approach: the model suite, learning curves for evaluating the number of observations, cross-validation model comparison, and SAS® Grid Computing.   Available in PDF.

Best Practices for Data Sharing in a Grid Distributed SAS® Environment (a SAS White Paper)
Storage performance is the most critical component of implementing SAS in a distributed grid environment. This paper provides an introduction to basic storage terminology and concerns. It also describes the best practices used during successful testing with SAS and several clustered file systems. This paper can be used as a reference guide when configuring a distributed environment that will perform and scale to meet the needs of your organization.    Available in PDF

SAS® Grid 101: How It Can Modernize Your Existing SAS Environment (presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
Grid computing promises many benefits, including improved performance of applications, higher resource utilization, lower cost of ownership, and flexibility for your IT infrastructure. This paper describes many of the business issues that can be addressed by SAS Grid Computing, as well as provide code examples of how to implement SAS applications on the grid. Learn how you can use SAS Grid Computing to modernize your existing SAS® environment and add new value to your existing applications with little or no change.    Available in PDF. Presentation available in PPS.

Introducing the SAS® Code Analyzer(presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
This paper introduces the PROC SCAPROC procedure, the SAS Code Analyzer that is new in Release 9.2 of Base SAS® Software. We will examine the advantages of using the procedure, its syntax and phases of execution, and the output that the procedure can produce. This procedure greatly facilitates grid enabling your existing SAS programs.    Available in PDF. Presentation available in PPS.

Balancing the Load - SAS® Server Technologies for Scalability(presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
This paper will address a variety of SAS® servers and how they can be used to balance workload and work together to provide scalability in a SAS Enterprise deployment. We will discuss a variety of servers including stored process servers, workspace servers, data step batch servers, and grid servers. We also will discuss the options for using these servers to balance load and provide solutions that can leverage a scale-out architecture.   Available in PDF. Presentation available in PPS.

Archtecting a Finely Tuned SAS® Grid Solution(presented at SAS Global Forum 2008)
SAS Grid Computing is a scale-out SAS solution that enables SAS applications to better utilize computing resources. When architecting a SAS Grid Computing solution it is important to understand the components required to ensure a scalable and high optimized solution. This paper details some of the components necessary to architect and tune a SAS Grid Computing solution.   Available in PDF

A Throughput-Intensive Compute and Storage Grid Using SAS® Grid Manager (presented at SAS Global Forum 2007)
The time has come when a $2,000,000 SMP UNIX server can be replaced by a $200,000 grid of even greater performance, reliability, and fault tolerance. We'll discuss the considerations made in selecting the key grid components: grid node hardware, network in frastructure, and storage strategy. We'll look at detailed performance metrics of our pilot grid, which executes single-threaded and massively parallel SAS workloads using SAS Grid Manager software on Linux. We'll discuss details down to the MB/s and how you can choose the right hardware for your processing needs, given your budget. Finally, we'll discuss the business challenges of implementing a grid, including convincing your leadership of a grid's value, working with the IT Department, and software licensing.    Available in PDF.

Best Practices for Setting Up Computer Hardware in a Grid Environment (presented at SAS Global Forum 2007)
This presentation gives guidelines and best practices for creating a successful SAS grid architecture. A key component to the success of Enterprise grids accessing large amounts of data is a high performance shared file infrastructure. Examples are given of running a SAS grid with different shared filesystems that provide scalable and sustainable I/O throughput as the size of the grid increases. The goal of this information is to present a variety of viable architectures for a SAS grid environment.    Available in PPS

SAS Goes Grid - Managing the Workload Across Your Enterprise (presented at SUGI31)
Learn how grid computing and scheduling have been incorporated and automated to deliver value in a highly efficient manner for SAS analytics, data integration (ETL), data mining and business intelligence. Also learn about advanced configuration options that you can use to fine-tune your SAS grid environment and allow multiple applications to efficiently and dynamically use a virtual IT infrastructure.   Available in PDF

Advanced Warehousing with SAS®9 (presented at SUGI31)
The world of data warehousing, data marts, and data integration continues to progress as more complex Business Intelligence environments become more widespread. This paper discusses the new and improved capabilities of SAS Data Integration Server including parallel execution of processes in a grid and working with parallel storage.    Available in PDF

SAS and Grid Computing - Maximize Efficiency, Lower Total Cost of Ownership (presented at SUGI29)
Grid computing is about leveraging your available resources and idle processor cycles to more quickly solve a problem while at the same time maximizing efficiency and reducing your total cost of ownership. This paper will discuss how SAS works in a grid, the types of applications that are well suited to grid computing and success stories using SAS in a grid.   Available in PDF

Multiprocessing with Version 8 of the SAS System
This paper introduces MP CONNECT technology and how it can be used to run portions of your applications in parallel to reduce the total elapsed time required to complete your job.  Available in PDF

The %Distribute System for Large-Scale Parallel Computation in the SAS System
This paper describes how to use MP CONNECT and the SAS macro facility to accomplish grid or high performance computing. A "divide and conquer" approach was taken to leverage the processing power of a variety of machines, using them in parallel to dramatically reduce the processing time of a Monte Carlo simulation. You can also download this ZIP file, which contains the SAS file used in the Monte Carlo simulation discussed in this paper.   Available in PDF

SAS Parallel Scoring Optimization (white paper)
As data proliferates, organizations are taking advantage of data mining techniques to develop tactical and strategic insight into these vast data stores. Read how SAS parallel scoring can support an enterprise-class data mining operation.   Available in PDF

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