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Power Tools 1993 November - Disc 2
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Power Tools Plus (Disc 2 of 2)(November 1993)(HP).iso
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scssas
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scssas.txt
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1993-04-20
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HP Workstations.. At Work At..
SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC
How HP Helps SAS Institute's
Source Management Group
"Steal" Some Computers Every Night
SAS Institute's industry-leading information-delivery
software covers the entire operation of the enterprise:
from executive-information systems to financial-planning
products, econometric models to performance monitors, report
generators to project-management tools. Based on
consistent, easy-to-use visualization and graphing
capabilities, the SAS System provides a seamless view of an
organization through total control over data access,
management, analysis and presentation -- no matter where the
data resides.
In other words, these products provide today what open
industry-standard systems hope to provide tomorrow: an
intuitive graphical user interface to distributed data no
matter how or where it is stored. Such a capability is
available today because SAS Institute decided in 1985 that
it couldn't wait for the industry standards to evolve. The
leading data management software that SAS System
applications use runs on all the leading system platforms.
To give customers their choice of mainframes, VAX, Windows,
DOS, OS/2 or UNIX environments, SAS Institute ports its very
complex code everywhere.
The SAS System includes more than 125 separate applications
"built to work together." That's over 6,000,000 lines of
code, according to Dave Phillips, of SAS Institute's Source
Management Group. That size and complexity present quite a
challenge to a group that has to "steal" its computers.
That's why the group's day-to-day (we should really say
night-to-night) success is a lesson for the industry.
With Hewlett-Packard, SAS Institute
Developers Never Have To Know
They're At The Scene Of The Crime
SAS Institute designs and develops products to work on many
proprietary system platforms. But to do the design and
development, SAS Institute uses a platform that is as close
to industry standard as any available, an HP Apollo 9000
series Model 7xx system. During the day, there are over 800
HP720 workstations, internetworked on multiple
Cabletron/Cisco-connected Ethernet LANs. The LANs are tied,
in turn, to an FDDI ring of about 50 HP750 file servers.
Every night, one or more of the LANs is "stolen,"
transformed into one "super" computing resource, becoming a
powerful HP-UX computational cluster using HP Taskbroker.
The SAS System Offers
A Multivendor Architecture
As Well Planned As
The Great Train Robbery
To speed the "build" process and get to market faster, SAS
Institute made some important strategic decisions in the mid
80's relative to standardizing source-code development.
Most important, it began writing its base source code in C
for maximum portability. The alternative of developing,
maintaining and distributing code coupled too tightly to
multiple vendor's architectures would have slowed time to
market and had a negative effect on quality. The success of
this strategy (see sidebar on "What The Experts Say") proves
how dedication to industry standards can be a major benefit
to any software developer.
In addition, SAS Institute's success provides a lesson about
a fixed software-manufacturing methodology for updating and
building code (see sidebar on their software-manufacturing
strategy). In this case, no particular off-the-shelf CASE
method was suitable because of its unique portability
requirements. But Dave Phillips feels they achieved results
similar to the packaged methodologies with their
inhouse-built tools for:
- checkin/checkout,
- file comparisons,
- storage differences,
- scripts and
- the actual build facility.
The key is following the method consistently.
Actual SAS System enhancements and upgrades are based on
user input from the annual SAS User Group International
(SUGI) conference, which draws users from around the world,
and the SASware ballot available to all users. In the past
decade, over 85% of the users' top-10 requests have been
incorporated.
At SAS Institute, individual product-development group
(graphics, statistics, reporting, etc.) decide when code is
ready to begin the build process. Testing is done by the
many target vendor-specific-platform groups. Source
Management is in the middle (see diagram). The Source
Management Group facilitates code flow in two ways:
- by supporting the ongoing, iterative updating of
revisions in progress, and
- by managing the build process when a revision is
stable and ready for release to the target-platform
groups for testing.
Source Management uses the applications developers' own
systems to get the job done. Originally, this was done at
the same time as development. But in 1990, they moved to
the client/server batch-cluster approach, using HP
TaskBroker, because the developers' workstations had
outstripped network power. The development and revise/build
functions were getting in each others way, competing for
processing power.
HP TaskBroker solved the problem. It distributes the work
of rebuilding and regenerating six to seven million lines of
code on a nightly basis, after the developers have finished
their daily work. This gives the developers the maximum
power of their LANs during the day; and means they have
access to the most up-to-date code when they begin work the
next day.
HP TaskBroker transparently selects the best workstation on
the network to do a task, transfers the task's associated
data to the workstation and starts the task. For example, a
particular product-development group -- whose application is
ready for release to the target groups -- might be set up
with TaskBroker for four to five "build" phases, each
consisting of 20 or more separate tasks. These tasks are C
programs that perform UNIX-Make-like functions such as
designating the files to be updated, checking date-time
dependencies, executing commands, looking at files and
comparing sources to runtimes, etc. HP clustering also
figures in the development processes even when code is not
ready for release to a target group.
According to Dave Phillips, Source Management is seeing
two-hour improvement over the use of individual servers
because of HP Taskbroker software. And HP's consistent
dedication to truly open systems and adherence to developed
standards made HP-UX a perfect control mechanism for
source-code development. All of which helps get the SAS
System to market faster. They have/are planning to install
Taskbroker in the Quality Assurance department as well.
SAS Institute is also using HP disk arrays in its
computational clusters. They have reduced downtime because
of their RAID capabilities, provided increased storage
capacity without having to increase the number of servers,
and saved space as well.
The Future:
With New HP Cluster Concepts
The Source Management Group
May Have To Go Straight
"Of course, it's still not the type of computational
clustering where one workstation is stealing the other guy's
cycles or accessing a file server while it's working,"
according to Phillips. Some day, that type of clustering
may speed the iterative process in the same way batch
clustering has helped the "build" process overnight.
And tuning is still a "seat of the pants" operation, he
says. They "look at which pieces execute first and move
tasks around to enhance dispatching and execution." SAS
Institute is depending on HP-sponsored Open Software
Foundation DCE and DME products to provide the methodology
to improve that process.
Dave Phillips is also looking at the new Convex/HP cluster
concept, which he feels may "keep workstations available
even longer, moving the many different versions of the SAS
System to market faster." Where the Source Management group
reports processing time reduced from 12 hours using a single
processor to 4 hours (depending on a lot of variables) using
Taskbroker-supported clustering, they foresee an average
build time of 2 hours if they go to a dedicated cluster
concept.
And that will be the end of the Source Management Group's
double life.
Look at what the experts
say about SAS Institute's Multivendor
Architecture products
- "Some observers liken SAS's Multivendor Architecture
products to IBM's SAA--the difference being that SAS has
already begun to distribute its software."
- Datamation
- "SAS Institute has been ahead of its time in addressing
the need of large corporations to escape hardware
limitations."
- Datapro Reports
Today, the SAS System is supporting more than 3,000,000
users in 100 countries at over 25,000 sites and is one of
the world's largest independent software companies and the
85th largest information-systems company. Dr. James H.
Goodnight, SAS Institute President, has some simple advice
for software developers who would also like to experience
such growth: "Technology is not an end in itself. Instead,
it is the means through which the organizations we serve can
become more effective, more productive, more competitive and
more profitable." In other words, build what the customer
wants. In investing 35% of revenues in research and
development, twice the industry average, Goodnight is
following through on that advice.
The key results of that research cited by users are the SAS
System's tools for:
- EIS
- Application development
- Object-oriented programming
as well as end-user tools for:
- Report writing
- Graphics
- Spreadsheets
- Quality improvement
- Financial modelling
- Forecasting
and the SAS Systems' wide range of data access, management,
analysis and presentation capabilities.
(sidebar on software methodology:)
Despite constant prescriptions to become more like
manufacturing, software development is still very much a
service. Like the proverbial shoemaker whose children go
barefoot, software providers even often fail to incorporate
tools that would speed time to market. The result: when a
supplier announces a new product, information-systems (IS)
management adds a year to the promised delivery date when
making plans that depend on that product. And when those
same managers begin an inhouse project, they go to great
lengths to set chief-executive and director expectations...
to the point of fudging their own schedules by months.
That's why IS managers and independent software vendors
alike could learn from the SAS Institute. SAS Institute
realizes the unpredictable nature of the programming art.
But when the artists code their last line of the day, a
computer-assisted process helps "build" that code into a
product.
The group builds software with the same precision, devotion
to Total Quality Management Systems, time-to-market concerns
and product-integration challenges as any chip foundry,,
board fabricator or systems supplier. The Source Management
Group's mission is to "synchronize the release of those
various ports to the market as much as possible." And they
want to increase the frequency of releases as well "to
provide SAS System customers with enhancements and updates
as often as prudently possible."
Due to its inhouse-developed build process -- and the
foresight to see this multi-platform need almost 10 years
ago -- SAS Institute is:
- already providing a "standard operating environment"
at the information retrieval/delivery level
- even while the IS industry is struggling to achieve
standardization at lower system levels.