SAS on Mac

[Nukular Winter]

Does anyone here have experience running SAS on Mac? The only thread I found was from 2007, with little information

I have the most recent version of iMac 27' i5 , 2.8Ghz . I have recently been admitted to a doctoral program, and will need to run SAS with some very large data sets

It would be very helpful if someone could answer the following questions..

(1) Will the performance be much affected by running Windows as a virtual machine on Parallels rather than Boot Camp?

(2) If I buy Parallels, can I use the same Windows installation both as a virtual machine for everyday use, and as a bootable system for the times I need to run performance-intensive models?

(3) Should I buy 64bit or 32bit licences for SAS and Windows?

(4) Would Linux be a reasonable alternative to Windows (for someone with very limited Linux experience), if the only purpose of installing an alternate operating system is SAS software?

Thank you!

[balamw]

Originally Posted by Nukular Winter

need to run SAS with some very large data sets

(1) How large? In a VM situation your RAM is shared between the two OSes if you start to compete with the RAM size you give to the VM it will slow to a crawl and would not be recommended.

(2) Yes that works fine in both Parallels and VMWare, not sure about Virtualbox.

(3) Again how large are your datasets? And how much RAM do you have? You really only get a 64 bit benefit when you have more than 4 GB of RAM, preferably 8GB.

(4) Depends more on how SAS runs on Linux than anything else.

B

[ssmed]

SPSS runs well on the Mac. Perhaps you could use that as an alternative, if appropriate to your project.

[tomllama]

If you don't want JMP and need SAS, I'd want to run it via boot camp. If you want to process large data files, I'd eliminate the potential problems with parallels and run it without the VM.

I like parallels for the occasional, easy use of a Windows application, but if the bulk of the use will be focused on Windows, I boot directly to windows and not OSX.

Win7 as x64 or 32-bit will depend on what Mac you have. 64-bit refused to load on my MBP but runs fine on my MP.

[kuwisdelu]

It really depends on *how* large those "large" datasets are. Are we talking several thousand observations or several hundred thousand, with how many dimensions?

I'm not sure if Parallels has this feature, but VMWare Fusion allows you to virtualize a Bootcamp install. I'd say install Windows via Bootcamp and try it both ways ways, see what's more convenient.

ETA: Sounds like Parallels does allow that as well.

[balamw]

Originally Posted by kuwisdelu

It really depends on *how* large those "large" datasets are. ...

Isn't that what I said in my first reply points (1) and (2)?

B

[tomllama]

Yes, Parallels can use your boot camp partition and installation to create the virtual machine.