SAS

Description

From the SAS Home Page: SAS software provides business analytics solutions through the utilization of high-performance computing, data management, and the management, processing, and analysis of “big data.”

Version

9.4

Authorized Users

CIRCE account holders
RRA account holders
SC account holders

Platforms

CIRCE cluster
RRA cluster
SC cluster

Modules

SAS requires the following module file to run:

apps/sas/9.4

See Modules for more information.

Running SAS on CIRCE

The SAS user guide is essential to understanding the application and making the most of it. The guide and this page should help you to get started with your simulations. Please refer to the Documentation section for a link to the guide.

Note on CIRCE: Make sure to run your jobs from your $WORK directory!
Note: Scripts are provided as examples only. Your SLURM executables, tools, and options may vary from the example below. For help on submitting jobs to the queue, see our SLURM User’s Guide.

Interactive Mode

Establishing a GUI connection to CIRCE/SC

To use SAS, you will need to connect to CIRCE/SC with GUI redirection, either using:

CIRCE/SC Desktop Environment
SSH with X11 redirection
- If connecting from OSX or Linux via SSH, please ensure that you use one of the following commands to properly redirect X11:
  - ```
  [user@localhost ~]$ ssh -X circe.rc.usf.edu
```
  or
- ```
[user@localhost ~]$ ssh -X sc.rc.usf.edu
```

Next, use srun to enter an interactive shell. This example is for 48 hours using 4 cpu cores on 1 node with 8GB of shared memory:

srun --time=48:00:00 --mem=8192 --nodes=1 --ntasks-per-node=4 --pty /bin/bash

Once you get dropped into an interactive shell on the execution host, you need to load the SAS module.

module load apps/sas/9.4

You should now be able to execute “sas” (graphical mode) from the command line.

Batch Job submission

To run batch jobs on the CIRCE cluster, users will need to submit their jobs to the scheduling environment if their jobs take more than 20 minutes to run on a standard PC.

If, for example, you have a SAS script file named test.sas with all your tasks defined in it, you would set up a submit script to use the SAS kernel like this:

#!/bin/bash
#
#SBATCH --job-name=sas-test
#SBATCH --time=48:00:00
#SBATCH --mem=8192
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=4
#SBATCH --output=output.%j.sas-test

#### SLURM 4 processor SAS test to run for 48 hours.

# To prevent a lot of IO, store temporary data on local /tmp storage,
# but store log/output files to $WORK

export TMP_DIR=/tmp/${SLURM_JOB_USER}_${SLURM_JOB_ID}
mkdir -p $TMP_DIR

export PRINT_DIR=$WORK/sas/logs/${SLURM_JOB_ID}/
mkdir -p $PRINT_DIR


# Load the SAS module:
module load apps/sas/9.4

# Start SAS
sas test.sas -noterminal \
  -filelocks none \
  -work $TMP_DIR \
  -utilloc $TMP_DIR \
  -print $PRINT_DIR \
  -log $PRINT_DIR/$SLURM_JOB_NAME.$SLURM_JOB_ID.$SLURM_ARRAY_TASK_ID

SAS script files can either be created using a standard text editor or by exporting an existing worksheet from the graphical SAS interface in .sas format.

NOTE: When requesting your resources, you will need 1 more processor than the number of tasks in your SAS job. So, if you are using 3 tasks, you will need to request —ntasks-per-node=4.

NOTE: Please ensure that -work and -utilloc are located on /tmp of the compute node your job lands on, and NOT $WORK or $HOME[[Image:|Image:]]!

Next, you can change to your job’s directory, and run the sbatch command to submit the job:

[user@login0 ~]$ cd my/jobdir
[user@login0 jobdir]$ sbatch ./sas-test.sh

You can view the status of your job with the “squeue -u <username>” command

Documentation

Home Page, User Guides, and Manuals

SAS Home Page:
- http://www.sas.com/software/sas9/
SAS Product Documentation:
- http://support.sas.com/documentation/94/index.html

Benchmarks, Known Tests, Examples, Tutorials, and Other Resources

Scalable SAS Procedures:
- http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/procs/index.html
SAS/CONNECT Tips and Tricks:
- http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/tricks/connect.html

More Job Information

See the following for more detailed job submission information:

Reporting Bugs

Report bugs with SAS to the IT Help Desk: rc-help@usf.edu

SAS

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