High performance spreadsheet simulation on a desktop grid

Abstract

We present a proof-of-concept prototype for high performance spreadsheet simulation called S3. Our goal is to provide a user-friendly, yet computationally powerful simulation environment for end users. Our approach is to add power of parallel computing on Windows-based desktop grid into popular Excel models. We show that, by using standard Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), one can build a fast and efficient system on a desktop grid for simulation. The complexity of parallelism can be hidden from users through a well-defined computation template. This work also demonstrates that a massive computing power can be harvested by linking off-the-shelf office PCs into a desktop grid for simulation. The experimental results show that the prototype system is highly scalable. In the best case, the execution time can be reduced 13.6 times using 16 desktop PCs; the simulation time is dramatically reduced from 200 minutes to 14 minutes.