Preparing to Deploy the SAS High-Performance Analytics Environment :: SAS® High-Performance Analytics Infrastructure 3.6: Installation and Configuration Guide

User Accounts for the SAS High-Performance Analytics Environment

This topic describes the user account requirements for deploying and running the SAS High-Performance Analytics environment:

Installation and configuration must be run with the same user account.
The installer account must have passwordless secure shell (SSH) access between all the machines in the cluster.

Tip

We recommend that you install SAS High-Performance Computing Management Console before setting up the user accounts that you need for the rest of the SAS High-Performance Analytics infrastructure. The console enables you to easily manage user accounts across the machines of a cluster. For more information, see User Account Considerations for the Management Console.

The SAS High-Performance Analytics environment uses a shell script installer. You can use a SAS installer account to install this software if the user account meets the following requirements:

The SAS installer account has Write access to the directory that you want to use and Write permission to the same directory path on every machine in the cluster.
The SAS installer account is configured for passwordless SSH on all the machines in the cluster.

The root user ID can be used to install the SAS High-Performance Analytics environment, but it is not a requirement. When users start a process on the machines in the cluster with SAS software, the process runs under the user ID that starts the process. Any user accounts running analytics environment processes must also be configured with passwordless SSH.

Consider Umask Settings

The SAS High-Performance Analytics environment installation script (described in a later section) prompts you for a umask setting. Its default is no setting.

If you do not enter any umask setting, then jobs, servers, and so on, that use the analytics environment create files with the user’s pre-existing umask set on the operating system. If you set a value for umask, then that umask is used and overrides each user’s system umask setting.

Entering a value of 027 ensures that only users in the same operating system group can read these files.

Note: Remember that the account used to run the LASRMonitor process (by default, sas) must be able to read the table and server files in /opt/VADP/var and any other related subdirectories.

Note: Remember that the LASRMonitor process that is part of SAS Visual Analytics must be run with an account (by default, sas) that can read the server signature file. (This signature file is created when you start a SAS LASR Analytic Server and the file is specified in SAS metadata. For more information, see Establishing Connectivity to a SAS LASR Analytic Server in SAS Intelligence Platform: Data Administration Guide.)

You can also add umask settings to the resource settings file for the SAS Analytics environment. For more information, see Resource Management for the Analytics Environment.

For more information about using umask, refer to your Linux documentation.

Additional Prerequisite for Greenplum Deployments

For deployments that rely on Greenplum data appliances, the SAS High-Performance Analytics environment requires that you also deply the appropriate SAS/ACCESS interface and SAS Embedded Process that SAS supplies with SAS In-Database products. For more information, see the SAS In-Database Products: Administrator’s Guide.