SAS MP (Multi Processing) Connect

Question

I am developing my first piece of code using SAS MP Connect to run parallel threads from the same sas job.

I understand that MP CONNECT is limited physically only by the number of CPUs available, but I ideally don't want to be using all of them for my job!

Does SAS have an option to limit the number of MP CONNECT processes that are executed?

Answer 1

I am not aware of any MP CONNECT limitations related to the number of CPUs available. MP CONNECT is just a technique to create multiple SAS sessions that execute at the same time, all under the control of a "parent" session. The bigger concerns are I/O and memory, since each session is it's own process. You can even run MP CONNECT processes on a single CPU machine (in which case you'd not get true parallel performance of course).

Also, to your specific question, there is not an option to control how many MP CONNECT sessions you can invoke.

Here is a pretty good SAS paper; although it's a bit old, the principles are still valid.