Advice: System Specs

[AntonioCole]

Background: My wife is in healthcare and heavily involved in research but her primary job is patient care with no professional training in data science. She has asked for and is finally getting SAS and access to MarketScan, a large healthcare database. The folks in charge of the data access seem to be a little hesitant about the whole process and they indicate that typical jobs take 20+ hours. They also seem to think we need a beefy computer to run the numbers effectively.

Questions:

What sort of computer should we request/build? Big SSD and lots of RAM seem obvious but what would a reasonable system be if you were building one? Is there an advantage to more cores for this process?

Is a desktop computer the most effective solution? I don't know enough about this but it sounds like we are venturing into territory where a server or cloud based option would be superior.

[Reeza]

Can we assume this isn't relevant given you're referring to 4D SAS, not this SAS software?

https://us.4d.com/