In reply to Bartosz Jabłoński.

Thank you, Bart, for your feedback and sharing your code implementations. As always, there are many ways in SAS to solve a problem. Using SYSTASK to spawn multiple processes via OS commands running in a background mode is a viable option, especially in the SAS environments with SAS/CONNECT absent. But I wouldn't call it "simpler means". Using SAS/CONNECT you can have all your SAS code pieces in one place, while with SYSTASK you have greater overhead as you have to write your code out to external files to be run by OS command initiated by SYSTASK. To me using SAS/CONNECT provides simpler and cleaner solution (but obviously it comes at a cost of SAS/CONNECT license).

Still, the SYSTASK approach is quite practical. As matter of fact I am going to use it at one of our client's SAS installation that does not have SAS/CONNECT. For those who is interested, here are some other valuable resources on running SAS programs in parallel using just BASE SAS:
- Parallel Processing Your Way to Faster Software and a Big Fat Bonus: Demonstrations in Base SAS® by Troy Martin Hughes;
- Parallel Processing with Base SAS by Jim Barbour.