In SAS Grid Manager environments, SAS administrators must often set up separate configurations based on a mix of requirements for departments, client applications and user roles. To accomplish this in previous SAS releases, administrators must define multiple SAS Application Server contexts, each with its own grid server definition and associated options. This approach often leads to a proliferation of SAS Application Servers that are difficult to use and maintain.  You asked for a simpler solution, and SAS delivered the “grid options set” feature in SAS 9.4 grid computing.

A grid options set is a collection of grid options, SAS system options and required grid resources that can be applied automatically when jobs are submitted to the grid. There are three steps to deploying them:

1. Create one SAS Application Server instance for each user group or role.
2. Define a grid options set for each client application.
3. For each SAS Application Server, map the users to the application and the grid options set.

Once defined and mapped, grid option sets are automatically applied to a workload whenever an identified user accesses the client application and submits a job to the grid.  To learn more about grid options sets and other enhancements to SAS Grid Manager in SAS 9.4, check these resources:

• The Top Four User-Requested Grid Features Delivered with SAS® Grid Manager 9.4
• What’s New in SAS Grid Manager 9.4
• Grid Computing in SAS 9.4

For more general information on SAS grid computing, look through these sites on support.sas: 

• Introduction to SAS Grid Computing—an overview of enterprise deployment needs
• Grid Computing Documents—a collection of SAS-authored technical documents
• Grid Computing Papers—a collection of white papers and presentations, mostly from SAS Global Forum
• High Availability with SAS Grid Manager—detail on how to configure high availability of your critical SAS services