Applications/SAS

Application Details

• Description: SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics.
• Versions: 9.4
• Module names: SAS/9.4
• License: Departmental research only multi-platform license, restricted to Accounting and Finance department
• Forum support: https://www.hpc.hull.ac.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=22
• Further information: http://www.sas.com/en_gb/home.html

Usage Examples

Interactive

[username@login01 ~]$ interactive
salloc: Granted job allocation 289669
Job ID 289669 connecting to c170, please wait...
Last login: Thu Jan 26 12:59:11 2017 from 10.254.5.246
[username@c170 ~]$ module add test-modules SAS/9.4

To use the full SAS GUI, make sure you have your environment setup as detailed in LINK and run sas_en:

[username@c170 ~]$ sas_en

To use the command line interactive line mode and not the GUI, run sas_en –nodms:

[username@c170 ~]$ sas_en –nodms

Some functions invoke a SAS window even in interactive line mode, for full line mode use –noterminal flag, i.e.:

[username@c170 ~]$ sas_en -nodms –noterminal

You can then run your task using a SAS script with the following command:

[username@c170 ~]$ sas_en -noteminal sas_file.sas

Batch Submission

A better approach is to submit tasks to run automatically without any interaction. To do this, you need a job submission script, an example of which is:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -J SASjob
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -n 1
#SBATCH -o %N-%j.log
#SBATCH -e %N-%j.err
#SBATCH -p compute
#SBATCH --mem=10G
 
module add test-modules SAS/9.4
 
sas_en -memsize 10G -cpucount 1 -nothreads -noterminal ms_sur_LCT.sas

Details: Line 1 - just a standard line that needs to be at the top of the file Line 2 - the -J sets the name of the job, in this case to SASjob. This doesn’t impact on the job and doesn’t have to be unique. It helps distinguish tasks when looking in squeue (LINK) Line 3 - this requests you are allocated 1 compute node. SAS should only be run on 1 node Line 4 - this requests one slot on the node. As you have some tasks that make use of functions which I believe may benefit from parallel computation, we may change this (and other settings) at a later date. For now leave as 1 Line 5 and 6 - these set the output and error files. The log file will contain SAS console output, the error file will contain information that may be useful if things don’t work as expected (at a cluster level) Line 7 - this requests the job runs on one of the compute nodes on the compute queue. Line 8 - this requests 10GB of RAM be made available for the task. This can be changed as necessary for the task Line 9 - this provides access to the SAS software module Line 10 - this is the run command. Note that the –memsize size should match that requested in line 8, while –cpucount should match line 4. Change the last .sas filename as appropriate

This submission script can be found at /path/to/sample/script

[username@login01 ~]$ sbatch SAStest.job
Submitted batch job 289552