topic Re: GPU & SAS in SAS Programming

GPU & SAS

Varada — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 02:25:00 GMT

How to use GPU to support SAS operation?

Re: GPU & SAS

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 06:47:27 GMT

If you mean the graphics coprocessor of your video card, then the basic answer is AFAIK "no".

SAS is written as a highly portable software system, where most platforms have very powerful CPUs that don't need the support of coprocessors.

And the maximum numerical precision used is 64-bit real numbers, which are easily handled by today's main processors even in simple PC's

Re: GPU & SAS

joerg_schad — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 10:36:58 GMT

Is there any update as of 2018 to this question?

Re: GPU & SAS

ChrisNZ — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 04:06:40 GMT

Nothing has changed.

GPUs are 1) targeted at very specialised worlloads 2) optimised for highly parallel work and 3) proprietary hardware.

In contrast 1) SAS processes are varied, 2) mostly single-threaded, and 3) SAS is portable across different platforms (just four really these days: AMD-64, IBM's Power Architecture, HP's PA-RISC, and IBM's mainframes).

Furthermore, the bottleneck in SAS processes is seldom the CPU (though that is changing as the speed of CPUs doesn't increase very much nowadays, while storage speeds are leaping ahead).