SAS Institute, Inc. Partnership Overview

The Watt Family Innovation Center has installed a local "mini-cloud" that operates SAS products. The cloud runs on servers hosted at the Watt Center, which keeps users from having to install SAS products on individual devices.

The processing capability, memory and bandwidth available through the Watt Center offers many advantages when compared to installing software on individual user devices. The Watt Center is also developing a multidisciplinary data analytics concentration and a student-based analytics experimentation laboratory, which will be available to all colleges, departments and students at no charge.

The Watt Center SAS Cloud is composed of the following modules:
SAS Visual Analytics: Includes interactive reporting, visual discovery and web-based dashboard.
SAS Enterprise Miner: Supports text mining, time series and big data analytics.
SAS Visual Studio: Includes your classic SAS experience, all available in a web browser.

Additional solutions that we offer include real-time data processing, database integration (ODBC compliant databases such as SQL Server, My SQL, PostgresSQL and Oracle) and access to other non-relational data stores.

We also offer additional tools such as intergration with Hadoop and are particularly interested in testing the integration of this technology with the Clemson Hadoop infrastructure.

Users are currently able to login with their Clemson credentials (username and password), but Watt Center staff still has to add their username to the SAS Metadata server to define them in the SAS environment. Users can request access by filling out our SAS survey.

The Watt Center is currently working on integration with Central, which will allow users to be added in one or more Central groups and will then automatically create the user in the SAS Metadata server. The Watt Center staff will still need to assist with setting up environments for user's data and importing data, unless the Public Folder is acceptable for the data.

We have started integration with LDAP/Shibboleth/SSL, and users can enter their Clemson ID to login with the aforementioned conditions. We have not fully integrated with Shibboleth yet.

The new license supports at least 25,000 Clemson users for non-commercial research and teaching purposes. A remote access addendum is also in place, which covers remote users connecting to servers hosted at the Watt Center.

Noncommercial Research Activities

Reference Master License Agreement (MLA) 11795, Supplement 16, Paragraph 6.1.9:

The full text of paragraph 6.1.9 is available upon request.

License Types

Teaching and Research License: As defined by SAS, is software used for purposes of classroom instruction, academic (non-commercial) research and coursework primarily related to the customer's post-secondary degree requirements, including the formulation of theses and dissertations. May be used by students, faculty and staff supporting these uses; in the case of academic research, it may be used by faculty, staff and students on hardware that is owned or leased by Clemson University and is located on the premises of the university.

Administrative Purposes License: As defined by SAS, is software used for purposes directly related to customer's operations as a post-secondary, degree-granting institution. This includes institutional research and any such use related to reporting about the University to the University. Such software may be used by customer's administrative employees (including faculty performing administrative duties) for such administrative purposes.

Clemson has previously purchased other legacy SAS products, which are affected as detailed below.

• Master License Agreement (MLA) #11795 and site licenses #51448 and #544513 provide Base SAS licenses for installation on individual computers (10 Administrative licenses and 300 Teaching/Research licenses). As a result of being included in the SAS gift, the annual renewal fees for site licenses #51448 and #544513 no longer need to be paid. SAS has agreed to waive this renewal. Additionally, SAS has agreed to allow Clemson to authorize 10 Administrative users to use the new SAS products included in the gift. These 10 Administrative users will be permitted to use the new SAS products for Institutional Research.
• MLA #11795 site license #589115 for the JMP products is not included in the SAS gift. The annual renewal fee cannot be waived and will need to be paid when due.
• There is a separate MLA #21946 with site license #35985, described as Health and Human Services Finance Commission. If this is still in use the renewal fee will need to be paid when due, as it appears this license is being used by Clemson in support of commercial research activity and is not covered by the gifted licenses.

The following training is provided by SAS; two Watt Center staff members have completed all training courses.

• SAS Platform Administration: Metadata Administration
• SAS Platform Administration: System Administration
• SAS Visual Analytics for SAS 9.0: Administering a Distributed Environment

• Once you've been added to the Viya environment, it might take up to an hour to propagate: 

  • https://viya.clemson.edu/SASStudioV/ (this is similar to SAS )

  • https://viya.clemson.edu/SASVisualAnalytics/ (another popular tool that is widely used)

• These resources are available offsite, but require the use of CUVPN (https://www.clemson.edu/ccit/get_connected/vpn/) or CUAPPS (https://cuapps.clemson.edu/). On CUAPPS, choose the Apps tab and then Google Chrome and navigate to the above links.

Online training is available:

• https://www.sas.com/en_us/training/overview.html

YouTube Resources:

• SAS How To Tutorials 

• Import Data with SAS Visual Analytics on SAS Viya

• Getting Started with SAS Studio on SAS Viya

Students enrolled in STAT 4020/6020 at Clemson University gain significant exposure to SAS products. At the conclusion of the Fall and Spring semesters, these students are able to take the SAS Base Programming certification exam at no cost.

Additional details will be posted as they become available.

SAS offers several free e-learning modules on their website. Log into the Skill Builders library with a SAS profile that uses your @clemson.edu email address.

Course topics include: