Dear LSF: Can you start a SAS Workspace Server?

SAS 9.4 has been out for some time now, and all SAS grid computing enthusiasts know that one of the new features is that SAS Workspace Server processes can be directly launched on the grid. (See The Top Four User-Requested Grid Features Delivered with SAS® Grid Manager 9.4.)

What does this mean? Well, in a sentence, the object spawner submits the command to start a workspace server to LSF, which in turn decides which server best fits the request and directly starts the workspace server.

What's different than before? SAS Grid Manager for SAS 9.3 already has a grid algorithm to use LSF to balance server workloads. With the SAS 9.3 load balancing algorithm, the object spawner delegates to LSF the responsibility to choose the best host, but keeps the role to start the actual server process.

With the SAS 9.4 grid load-balancing algorithm with grid-launched workspace servers, the object spawner delegates both responsibilities to LSF: to choose the best host and to actually start the process.

Here is a simple table that summarizes load-balancing and server processes across releases:

How does this change affect my applications?

Let's take SAS Enterprise guide as a sample. You go from this:

to this:

Advantages for grid-launched workspace servers

There are several advantages to using the SAS Grid Manager to launch workspace servers beyond the ability to apply policy. For SAS 9.4, this change eliminates:

GRIDWORK and RMTWORK libraries: there is only SASWORK.

a grid server process: there is now only a SAS workspace server process.

confusion when trying to monitor the user’s SAS process: now the same SAS process can be viewed from both SAS Management Console and Platform RTM for SAS.

Have you already used this new feature? Do you have any hint to share?

Dear LSF: Can you start a SAS Workspace Server? was published on SAS Users.