In reply to Steven Randolph.

SAS Viya can be deployed in either a single node architecture (Symmetrical Multiprocessing - SMP) or multi-node architecture (Massively Parallel Processing - MPP). So, SAS Grid would compare with SAS Viya MPP.

Both grid architectures are aimed at the same thing - distribute the workload across multiple machines (nodes) in an effort to increase execution speed, capacity and availability. The difference is in how that is accomplished.

SAS Grid distributes the workload across the worker nodes in a task-parallel mode. That is, divide the work such that worker nodes can accomplish different tasks in parallel. Users coding in SAS can take advantage of this with specific SAS Grid statements that separate their code into tasks that can be executed in parallel. SAS Enterprise Guide, for example, does this automatically.

SAS Viya MPP distributes the workload across the worker nodes in a data-parallel mode by default. This works especially well with in-memory processing of big data. In data-parallel mode, the data is distributed across multiple worker nodes. When an action executes, all nodes perform the action on the same data tables, but on different rows. The partial work on the rows located on a node results in a partial answer. The summary results from a single node need to be combined with the results from other nodes to produce the answer that represents all of the data.

It's important to note that SAS Viya MPP can also distribute work in task-parallel mode.

Hope this helps.