High-Performance Features of the OPTGRAPH Procedure

PERFORMANCE Statement

The PERFORMANCE statement defines performance parameters for multithreaded and distributed computing, passes variables that describe the distributed computing environment, and requests detailed results about the performance characteristics of a high-performance procedure. You can also use the PERFORMANCE statement to control whether the procedure executes in single-machine mode or distributed mode. This chapter uses the PERFORMANCE statement in both the OPTGRAPH procedure and the HPDS2 procedure.

You can specify the following performance-options in the PERFORMANCE statement.

COMMIT=number

requests that the procedure write periodic messages to the SAS log when the number of observations that are sent from the client to the appliance for distributed processing exceeds an integer multiple of number.

PROC OPTGRAPH ignores this option when it runs alongside the database, because no observations are sent from the client to the appliance.

However, this option is useful when you use PROC HPDS2 to distribute data to the appliance, as described in the section Distribute Data to Greenplum. PROC HPDS2 sends the data in blocks to the appliance. Whenever the number of observations sent exceeds an integer multiple of number, a SAS log message is generated. The message indicates the actual number of observations distributed, not an integer multiple of number.

DETAILS

requests a table that shows a timing breakdown of the procedure steps.

HOST="name" GRIDHOST="name"

specifies the name of the appliance host in single or double quotation marks. This option overrides the value of the GRIDHOST environment variable.

INSTALL="name" INSTALLLOC="name"

specifies the name (in single or double quotation marks) of the directory in which libraries that are shared by SAS high-performance software are installed on the appliance. This option overrides the value of the GRIDINSTALLLOC environment variable.

NTHREADS=number

specifies the number of threads for analytic computations and overrides the SAS system option THREADS | NOTHREADS. If you do not specify the NTHREADS= option, the number of threads is determined by the number of CPUs on the host on which the analytic computations execute.

By default, the OPTGRAPH procedure executes in multiple concurrent threads unless the NOTHREADS system option is specified or unless you force single-threaded execution by specifying NTHREADS=1. The largest value that you can specify for number is 256.

Note: The SAS system option THREADS | NOTHREADS applies to the client machine on which the OPTGRAPH procedure executes. It does not apply to the compute nodes in a distributed environment.

TIMEOUT=s

specifies the time-out in seconds for the procedure to wait for a connection to the appliance and establish a connection back to the client. The default is 120 seconds. If jobs are submitted to the appliance through workload management tools that might suspend access to the appliance for a longer period, you might want to increase the time-out value.