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- Delivering the fastest time
to intelligence with grid-enabled SAS
Grid computing is quickly growing in importance as a way to harness the power of distributed computing resources. This white paper focuses on the evolution of grid computing with SAS and discusses the benefits it can bring to your organization, including increased performance, massive scalability and greater availability. The paper also includes several real-world examples of the power of SAS Grid Computing. -
SAS First to Automate Enterprise Grid Computing
Capabilities
Industry's only vendor to grid-enable multiple applications, including data mining... - SAS Parallel Scoring Optimization
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.
Introduction to Grid Computing
The term, grid computing, has become one of the latest buzzwords in the IT industry. Grid computing is an innovative approach that leverages existing IT infrastructure to optimize compute resources and manage data and computing workloads. According to Gartner, "a grid is a collection of resources owned by multiple organizations that is coordinated to allow them to solve a common problem." Gartner further defines three commonly recognized forms of grid:- Computing grid - multiple computers to solve one application problem
- Data grid - multiple storage systems to host one very large data set
- Collaboration grid - multiple collaboration systems for collaborating on a common issue.
Grid computing is not a new concept but one that has gained recent renewed interest and activity for a couple of main reasons:
- IT budgets have been cut, and grid computing offers a much less expensive alternative to purchasing new, larger server platforms.
- Computing problems in several industries involve processing large volumes of data and/or performing repetitive computations to the extent that the workload requirements exceed existing server platform capabilities.
Some of the industries that are interested in grid computing include:
- life sciences,
- computer manufacturing,
- industrial manufacturing,
- financial services, and
- government.
SAS views grid computing as a means to apply the resources from a collection of computers in a network and to harness all the compute power into a single project, for example. Grid computing can be a cost effective way to resolve IT issues in the areas of data, computing and collaboration; especially if they require enormous amounts of compute power, complex computer processing cycles or access to large data sources. SAS additionally believes that grid computing needs to be a secure, coordinated sharing of heterogeneous computing resources across a networked environment that allows users to get their answers faster.
SAS recently announced the next phase in our evolution of grid capabilities. The announcement SAS First to Automate Enterprise Grid Computing Capabilities highlights three key features that will enable our customers to accelerate their SAS applications and more efficiently utilize and manage their IT infrastructure:
- grid automation
- more dynamic resource based load balancing
- improved monitoring and management of the grid environment.
While grid computing may be a new catchphrase in the IT industry, the concepts behind grid computing are not new to SAS. In fact, SAS Version 8.2 helps to enable grid computing with SAS/CONNECT's parallel processing functionality. SAS/CONNECT allows you to segment a job workload into independent units of work to be processed in parallel across any number of heterogeneous computers within a network. In SAS 9, SAS/CONNECT has been extended to include support for piping to allow dependent SAS processes to overlap their execution and eliminate the need to write intermediate results to disk.
We at SAS have created the Scalability Community to make you aware of the connectivity and scalability features and enhancements that you can leverage for your SAS installation. The success of this community depends on you. Send electronic mail to scalability@sas.com with your comments, requirements, and suggestions.