High performance spreadsheet simulation on a desktop grid

Abstract

In this paper, a high performance spreadsheet simulation system called S3 is presented. Our approach is to add power of parallel computing on Windows-based desktop grid into popular Excel models by using standard Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture. The complexity of parallelism can be hidden from users through a well-defined computation template. Our desktop grid is built from off-the-shelf office PCs connected together using a high-speed network. The experimental results show that the prototype system can deliver high performance. We can obtain more than seven times speedup for some test applications on a 8-PC system. Moreover, the implementation is highly scalable since 80–95% parallel computing efficiency can be maintained as the problem size grows.