Grid Computing at Texas Tech University using SAS

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Grid Computing at Texas Tech University using SAS

• Ron Bremer
• Jerry Perez
• Phil Smith
• Peter Westfall
• Director, Center for Advanced Analytics and
  Business Intelligence
• Texas Tech University

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What is Grid Computing?

• Grid computing means using multiple resources
  connected by the net to perform demanding
  calculations.
• Example

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Economies of High Performance Computing

• Current fastest machine 40 Teraflops (300M)
• 10 Tflops Machines
• (50M)
• Fastest Cluster at TTU 0.1 Tflops (0.1M)
• Speed of a PC 0.003 Tflops
• (.001M)

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Underused Resources

• Computers are everywhere, mostly idle!
• Grid computing leverages unused resources to
  create an effective Supercomputer
• Teraflops (N computers) x (TFLPs per)
• For Free! (Almost)

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Grid Initiatives at TTU and in Texas

• HipCAT High Performance Computing Across Texas
• TIGRE Texas Internet Grid for Research and
  Education
• SORCER Service ORienter Computing EviRonment
  (TTU CS dept.)
• SAS/Connect grid

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HipCAT

• Consortium of Texas institutions working together
  to use
• High performance computing
• Clusters
• Massive data storage
• Scientific visualization
• Grid computing.
• Director Phil Smith, Texas Tech University
• Members
• Baylor College of Medicine
• Rice University
• Texas AM University
• Texas Tech University
• University of Houston
• University of Texas
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Texas at Arlington
• University of Texas at El Paso
• University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

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TIGRE

• Texas Internet Grid for Research Education
• Two year project involving UT, TTU, UH, Rice,
  and TAMU
• Funding announced by the Governor in September
• TIGRE will develop a grid software stack and
  policies and procedures to facilitate Texas grid
  computing efforts.

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Grid Software Products Used at TTU

• AVAKI
• Globus
• Jini Networking Technology
• SAS/Connect (MPConnect), Distribute macro

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Benefits of SAS

• Ease of Use (relative to other grid products)
• Available and applicable for many scientists in
  their resp. fields
• Flexibility
• Data base (DATA step, PROC SQL)
• Math/Optimization (SAS/IML, SAS/OR)
• Stat (SAS/STAT, SAS/ETS)

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Problems Amenable to SAS Grid

• Replicates of Fundamental task
• Fundamental tasks are time consuming, lots of
  replicates
• Examples
• Simulation
• Astrophysics
• Bioinformatics
• Ensembles of predictive models

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Success Story

• Financial Event Studies
• Developed simulation tool to detect events
• Simulated its performance
• 25 hours finished in 40 minutes
• Published in J. Fin. Econometrics
• Old system Sneaker grid

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Another Success StoryPortfolio Analysis

• 300 portfolios, 50 securities each by randomly
  sampling securities from CRSP daily database
  (7.23 Gigabytes)
• 15 models created for each of 50 securities (PROC
  AUTOREG of SAS/ETS), under 169 treatment
  settings.
• 126,750 models and associated data steps per
  portfolio.
• 500 days of continuous computing time reduced to
  two weeks.

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Notoriety

• Web articles appeared in SAS, Grid today,
  Next-Gen Data forum
• Interviewed by DataBase Trends and Applications

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SAS Grid Structure

• Client connects to host machines
• Client sends replicates of fundamental task
  (chunks) to hosts
• Hosts process chunks, send back to client
• Client combines chunks and summarizes

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The SAS Grid
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SAS Farm

• 100 SAS machines in student lab
• 2.66 GhZ per node
• All have SAS software installed
• SAS Spawner must be started on all
• Avaki also installed - diagnoses problems

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Student Lab
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Load Balancing

• Automatically supports load balancing by farming
  out independent tasks to the next available
  resource.
• Students never noticed that their machines were
  being used!

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Simulation-Based Methods

• PROC MULTTEST of SAS/STAT(first hard-coded
  bootstrap?)

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Simulation-Based Methods, II

• Adjustsimulate in GLM and MIXED
• Posterior simulation in MIXED

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Toy Example Testing Random Number Generators

• Random number generators often fail to provide
  independent numbers.
• Test case U1, U2 are Uniform on (0,1).
• If independent, then E6(U1-U2)2 1.00.
• Check Generate many pairs, report average
  (should be 1.000000)

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Code
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Results
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Startup (Windows)
1. Start Spawner
C\Program Files\SAS\SAS 9.1gtspawner -i -comamid
tcp
2. Activate Spawner
3. Set batch log in permissions
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The Distribute Macro

• Written by Cheryl Doninger and Randy Tobias
• File http//support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/paper
  s/distribute.zip
• Supporting document
• http//support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/papers/dis
  tConnect0401.pdf

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Problems We Have Experienced

• Random crashes (client as well as hosts)
• Diagnosing errors
• I/O problems
• Windows Service Pack 2 Firewall
• Social issues (grid involves people!)

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Future Plans

• Support from business and government
• grid-enabled bioinformatics
• business intelligence/data mining
• Support HPC at TTU and in Texas