I am looking for hardware configuration suggestions to build a workstation that will run SAS at the highest speed possible.
I am currently running base SAS and SAS/STAT on a desktop running Windows 7 64-bit. However, as my data sets grow, the processing times have become unacceptable ( > 30 min ). As an example, I am running PROC HPMIXED with a data set with about 100,000 observations and about 30,000 subjects (variables). I anticipate even larger data sets in the future. I do no graphical/data mining/big data/text-processing work. I don't have large storate needs. A 1 TB hard disk should be plenty for my need. I know little about hardware. Here are my questions:
1) I think a workstation with a lot of processing (CPU) power and RAM would greatly reduce the processing times. Does this make sense?
2) On the Internet, I have seen 12-core CPU's and motherboards that can support two CPU's. Would SAS be able to take advantage of a workstation with two 12-core CPU's?
3) In terms of memory, I know that 64-bit can address over 100 GB of RAM. Could SAS potentially use all of this RAM?
4) Would I need any GPU's, given that I don't do any graphics work?
5) To keep things simpler, I want to stick with Windows and avoid any kind of distributed processing.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Cuneyt
Hi Cuneyt,
If you are building a workstation for yourself and have the budget, I'd suggest the following kind of thing looking at your usage:
I haven't profiled PROC HPMIXED yet and don't know if it's multithreaded or not, but might do tomorrow just to see if the above advice is way off. This is more of a general purpose workstation spec, which to be honest I personally think is overkill, but if you can afford it (which it seems you can) I think you'll be very satisfied with. It's extremely impressive what 8 threads and a few SSDs can do.
Windows is fine. You don't need a GPU.
Hope this helps.
Nik
Nik,
Thanks for all these suggestions.
Cuneyt
Your complexity seems to come from the subject level, not the number of records, 100,000 shouldn't be much.
Given that I'd suggest highly increasing your RAM becuase I'm fairly certain those types of processing are very RAM dependent.
I run a 16GB and use a 500 GB external SSD, i5 quad core processor and that's been fantastic for speed.
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