Accelerate insights with SAS® Analytics on IBM® POWER9™

23 October, 2019
Vicente Moranta
IBM

IBM and SAS have been collaborating since the founding of SAS. We have helped businesses answer their most challenging analytics questions – quickly. IBM Power Systems™ and IBM Storage have been a critical part of that collaboration since the 90s. In addition to our current SAS on AIX solution, we are excited to expand into the next phase of our relationship: SAS® Viya® 3.5 coming to IBM Power Systems on Red Hat Linux in Nov’19!

Our systems are designed from the ground up to address the key needs of SAS workloads. With industry-leading I/O and memory bandwidth, IBM Power Systems are engineered to accelerate the performance of SAS Analytics. Across the analytics lifecycle, from data discovery, model development and deployment to operationalizing analytics, SAS has a wide range of compute demands. IBM’s agile, full stack solution that includes server, storage and cloud orchestration offers flexible deployment models that can scale capacity based on changing resource needs.

Watch Ken Gahagan, Director – R&D SAS, talk about SAS’s key requirements from infrastructure and why Power Systems accelerate SAS Analytics like no other platform. With 1.8X larger memory bandwidth[1] and 2X better I/O bandwidth[2] all versus the compared x86 server based on Intel Xeon SP processors, Power Systems has the leadership benchmarks in key requirements for SAS Viya.

If you’re currently running SAS on an x86 platform, moving to POWER9 can offer a significant opportunity to accelerate SAS analytics.  And if you are already running your SAS workloads on POWER8 or earlier, this is the time to upgrade to POWER9 to help improve your performance and prepare you for the modernization of your analytics platform with SAS Viya. POWER9 is the foundation of the US Dept of Energy’s Summit and Sierra supercomputers, the two most powerful supercomputers in the world3. It’s time to bring the same technology to your SAS deployments.

Learn more about IBM Power Systems for SAS.

[1] 1.8X bandwidth is based on 230 GB/sec per socket for POWER9 and 128GB/sec per socket for x86 Scalable Platform identified in Intel product brief: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/xeon-scalable-platform-brief.pdf?asset=14606

[2] PCIe Generation 4 provides 2x data throughput vs. PCIe Gen 3 (31.5 GB/s vs 15.8 GB/s x16), based on publicly available material

3https://www.top500.org/lists/2019/06/

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