Most organizations that use SAS consist
of a variety of categories of users, with each category having its
own needs and expectations. For example, your organization might have
these users:
SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office users
these users are usually
running interactive programs, and expect immediate results.
SAS Enterprise Miner users
these users might be
using multiple machines to train models.
SAS Web Report Studio users
these users might be
scheduling reports to run at a specified time.
SAS Risk Dimensions users
these users might be
running jobs at night.
Some users in your environment might be running jobs
that have a high priority. Other users might be running jobs that
require a large number of computing resources. A SAS grid environment
must be able to account for all of these different needs, priorities,
and workloads.
In order to manage this
type of environment, you must be able to control when and where jobs
can run in the grid. You can manage grid resources using these strategies:
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Job slots. They enable you to control
how many jobs can run concurrently on each machine in the grid. This
enables you to tune the load that each machine in the grid can accept.
For example, you can assign a higher number of job slots to higher-capacity
machines, which specifies that those machines can process more jobs
concurrently.
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Queues. They enable you to control when jobs can run
and what computing resources are available to the jobs that are submitted
to the queue. You can create queues based on factors such as job size
or priority. You can also define job dispatch windows and run windows
for each queue. When you submit a job to a particular queue, the queue
settings determine when the job runs and what priority the job has
compared to other jobs that have been submitted to the grid. You can
also specify the number of job slots across the grid that a queue
can use at any one time. By combining the job-slot specification on
the hosts and queues, you can specify how work is distributed across
the grid.
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Resources. They enable you to specify where jobs are
run on the grid by specifying resource names on hosts and using matching
resource names on jobs. The resource names are specified on machines
in the grid to indicate what type of job each machine should run.
When you submit jobs to the grid, you can specify resource names to
specify which machines should be used to process the job.
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Multiple application server contexts.
They enable you to set up a grid environment that provides application
servers and associated queues for specific needs or workloads. For
example, you might want to define policies for different applications
running on the grid (such as SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Data Integration
Studio, and batch SAS programs), or you might want to define policies
for different business units that are using the grid. After defining
the grid, you can define an application server and logical grid server
for each of the contexts that you need. You can also define a queue
that is associated with each logical grid server. When you use a SAS
application to submit a job to the grid, you specify the grid server
that corresponds to the context that you need (SAS Enterprise Miner,
SAS Data Integration Studio, and batch SAS programs, for example).