When SAS decided that they needed to provide enterprise scheduling capability they partnered with Platform Computing and bundled an OEM version of their LSF product into some of the suites, such as Data Integration Server and Business Intelligence Server (although I believe they are no longer bundled and have to be purchased separately).

Platform LSF provides the relatively unique capability of being able to schedule jobs across Mainframe, Unix and Windows servers (Oracle and Microsoft users will ask why this is needed, but remember SAS has been around for 25+ years, so there is still SAS on mainframes at most large SAS sites)

On the Platform website the marketing team have compiled a very descriptive description:

“Process Manager for SAS is comprehensive job scheduling software that automates the scheduling and execution of SAS jobs. It offers the sophistication of resource virtualization, optimal resource sharing, enterprise scalability and seamless manageability across the entire enterprise. SAS Grid-enabled Products -SAS Enterprise ETL Server -SAS Enterprise Miner -SAS Risk Dimensions”

The nice thing is SAS integrated LSF to talk to the Metadata Server, providing a reasonable level of automation.

Anyway there was an interesting paper called SAS® Scheduling: Getting the Most Out of Your Time and Resources at SUGI 30 in 2005, that outlines what LSF is, how to use it with SAS and even has some code examples.