1 Using SAS Parallel-Processing Features To Reduce Program Execution Time Presented by Berwick Chan Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center NCAL Division of Research October 2009 For BASAS October 2009 meeting

2 MP in SAS  Starting in version 6, SAS introduced multi-processing feature  Starting in version 9, SAS introduced a new SPD engine that provide multi- thread processing power

3 MP-Connect  Provided by the SAS-Connect module  Uses default SAS engine LIBNAME libref 'SAS-data-library  Allows independent tasks / steps within the same SAS program to be executed concurrently  Requires additional programming

4 SPDE Engine  Uses Scalable Performance Database Engine LIBNAME libref spde 'SAS-data-library'  Provides multi-thread process automatically  Requires no additional programming  Requires additional setup process for SAS library / table

5 SAS (Default) Processing Flow SAS starts Task 1 Task 2 SAS ends Execution Time X seconds y seconds Total: (x+y) seconds

6 SAS MP Processing Flow SAS starts SAS ends SAS starts Task 1 SAS ends Execution Time Task 2 Task1Task 2 x sec y sec Total exec time: max(x,y) sec

7 Sequential / MP Process Comparison  Program executed in sequential process  Program executed in MP  Result: MP version takes about 59% execution time of the sequential version (34.78 sec vs sec), a 41% savings.

8 More About MP-Connect  Provides a new set of SAS commands  Enables communications among concurrent sessions / tasks: –Work libraries sharing –Macro variables passing –Session status checking –Pipeline parallelism (using SASESOCK engine)  Manages computer resource more efficient across systems

9 More About MP-Connect  Not applicable to all programs, good for running independent tasks within the same program. Ideal applications: –Production jobs with short update windows –ETL applications that access different databases –Online applications that demand quick response  Performance enhancement on individual program may vary and is depending on system resource availability during program execution

10 More About MP-Connect  Useful links: