Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn some tips and tricks to speed implementation and performance of SAS Viya on Intel Xeon processors.
You will learn:
The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.
Q&A
Does this require Kubernetes? Can I use OpenShift instead?
You can definitely use OpenShift. OpenShift flavor? Kubernetes.
Was the testing done on prem or in the cloud?
Suleyman and his team set up servers at Intel that was on premises. New servers with the new Sapphire Rapids to run the compute jobs against. We have very capable servers to handle the services and NFS. Some of the pod limitations prevented us from leveraging all the capabilities initially. We quickly overcame that by reconfiguring kubelet. We were doing A/B testing of the third-generation Intel Xeon (Ice Lake) against the 4th generation Intel Xeon (Sapphire Rapids). The third-generation platform had 38 Core Ice Lake CPUs with half a TB of memory and the Sapphire Rapids was a 56 core CPU with a TB of memory configured. We were using hostpath with direct attached drives for this testing. That's the easiest environment to set up, but we're expanding this to also include a Lustre based shared file system to mimic what might look like a deployment in your data center and similarly for cloud. Ice Lake CPUs are also available on certain instances on AWS, GCP or Azure. Those were third generation Xeons, Ice Lakes. Now we have the 4th Gen available as well. If you for example go to AWS, the M7 instances are all built on Sapphire Rapids. You could replicate this testing in the cloud if you would like to.
What is the public availability of Intel 4th Generation Xeon processors for both on prem and in the cloud?
Public clouds now have Sapphire Rapids on both Google and AWS. They're explicitly offered as separate instance generations C3 on Google or GCP and M7 on AWS. On Azure, we have the confidential computing instances that are Sapphire Rapids based. They are in private preview and will be available generally early next year in 2024. That's the cloud side. From an OEM perspective, HP, Dell, Cisco, Lenovo, etc. have servers based on Sapphire Rapids since January’23. You should be good to go there, as well.
Could you share any sizing to take advantage of running SAS Viya with OpenShift on bare-metal Intel servers to take advantage of larger bare-metal server-based sizing versus virtual machine-based sizing, and consolidate multiple workload node pools?
The SAS sizing team should be able to provide guidance on this.
It requires capturing information about what SAS solutions we're talking about, information about data volumes, number of users and so forth. If the question is geared toward what would it look like if we were to deploy on the cloud versus what would it look like if we decided to deploy on premises, some of the same inputs would be required and the sizing team would take into account. But we're looking at an Azure deployment and these are the characteristics of their AKS offering versus what flexibility do we have to purchase the right sized on premises hardware, to configure OpenShift, and so forth. There's no answer I can give about this is how you do it. We would have to go through the process of sizing, for which there's a dedicated team that's asked to help, if this is a sales engagement. We usually go through the account team to initiate that. Probably the place to start. But to the essence of the question, one of the testing plans on our To Do List is to exactly replicate what you’re asking. We did in an open source Kubernetes. Let's move to Red Hat OpenShift, what do we see there? Then potentially compare that to doing OpenShift inside a VM, where VM in an on prem environment. These are some of the things we're planning to do. Be on the lookout for future publications from both Intel and SAS on our experience.
Recommended Resources
About 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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