Accessing SAS on HPC

Owned by glenn-johnson
Last updated: Apr 17, 2019Version comment
1 min read

SAS version 9.4_TS1M2 has been installed on the HPC system. More information about SAS can be found on the SAS Website.

The default for SAS on Argon is the command line interface. This is usually appropriate for an HPC system but if you need the GUI it can be gotten to with a couple of extra steps. First, you must login with X11 communication forwarded over the SSH connection. This can be accomplished by the following methods:

  1. forwarding X11 traffic from a standard terminal
    ssh -Y argon.hpc.uiowa.edu
  2. using FastX (FastX connections)

Once you are logged in then you can start the SAS GUI with the following commands

module load sas
sas -dms

Note that no long running compute intensive jobs are allowed to run on the login nodes, whether using the GUI or the command line interface. All such production jobs should be submitted to compute nodes via SGE's qsub process. This generally means putting the following in a script

module load sas
sas my_sas_program

and submitting the job via qsub

qsub my_sas_jobscript