SAS/CONNECT User's Guide

Benefits of Using Compute Services with RSUBMIT

One or more remote machines on your network may have vector processors or other larger, faster hardware resources that would more efficiently accomplish the CPU intensive portions of your application. Compute services enable you to move any or all segments of an application to a remote machine for execution. The results of the remote execution are returned to the local SAS session for processing, management by the local graphical user interface (GUI), or both.

In addition to CPU resources, a remote machine may have peripherals attached that would otherwise be inaccessible to you on a stand-alone local system. A PC in another part of your organization may have a plotter or a printer attached to it that you need to use. By directing your local SAS session to move its graphics processing to the remote PC and pointing to the PC's output device, you can get a hard copy of your graph from the remote plotter.

Data center rules or data characteristics may mandate a single, centralized copy of the data that is needed by your application. By moving the processing to the remote system where the data resides, there is no need to transfer or create additional copies of the data. Using only one copy of data can fulfill security needs as well as enable access to data sources that are too large or too dynamic to be transferred.

For example, although data links between host systems make file transfers convenient and easy, large files do not move quickly between hosts. Furthermore, it is inefficient to maintain multiple copies of large files when developing and testing programs that are designed to process those files. With SAS/CONNECT you can overcome this limitation by developing programs on one system while running them and keeping the data that they use on a different system. (The programs run on the remote host when they are remote-submitted.)

To test your programs, you execute the SAS program on the remote host by remote-submitting it from the local SAS session. All processing takes place on the remote host computer where the data resides, but the output appears on your local host. This method requires no file transfer, yet it permits you to process data that is stored on one system using programs that were developed on another system.

The ability to execute remote submits asynchronously allows you to continue processing on your local host while the remote submit processes in the background. Asynchronous processing provides increased time efficiency by allowing you to perform multiple tasks at the same time. Using this technique, you can start a long running task in the background on a remote host, and immediately be able to begin another task on another remote host or continue local processing, rather than wait until the first remote task is complete before regaining control of your local SAS session. This also provides you with flexibility as to when and where tasks are performed.

Both synchronous and asynchronous remote submits can be used with the Output Delivery System (ODS) to make changes to the format and appearance of the SAS output that is generated on the remote host. Using ODS, each piece of output is an "object" that can be manipulated and viewed in many ways.

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