SAS on HPC

The environment for SAS is created by typing

use sas

You only need to type this once at the beginning of your login session. Batch jobs should be submitted through the SLURM scheduler just like any other batch job

sbatch -p main --qos main myprogram.sas

You may also create a batch file with your parameters and submit with that. An example contents of such a program (called myprogram here )

#SBATCH -p main
#SBATCH --qos main
#SBATCH -o myoutputfile

sas mysasprog.sas

Interactive jobs may not be run on the master node. You will need to create the SAS environment by typing

use sas

If you are running Xwindows (use Xming or a similar xserver on your desktop) you can submit an interactive job like this:

salloc -n 1 -p main --qos main xterm -e 'ssh -X `srun hostname`'

then start sas

sas

Alternatively you may run a sas file in an interactive shell without Xwindows:

salloc -n 1 -p main --qos main sh -c 'ssh `srun hostname`'

then in the resulting shell:

sas mycommands.sas

SAS does not support MPI (which would allow it to coordinate multiple processes running on different nodes), but it does have some support for using multiple CPU cores within a single node. The default sbatch options used above will allocate only a single core. You can add:

#SBATCH -n 8   # use 8 cores
#SBATCH -N 1   # all on one node

And then, within your .sas program, to enable thread support and use the correct number of CPU cores:

options threads cpucount=%sysget(SLURM_NTASKS);