ActiveSheets: Super-Computing with Spreadsheets

Abstract

Spreadsheets are important business tools. Increasingly they are being used for simulation e.g. to perform risk analysis. Such tasks have far greater computational demands than traditional spreadsheet bookkeeping applications. In this paper we show how spreadsheets can support supercomputing. This is achieved without requiring the spreadsheet user to have specialist tools or knowledge. The key technical innovation is a mechanism enabling the concurrent evaluation of spreadsheet functions. Furthermore the mechanism does not require modification of the standard spreadsheet evaluation engine. INTRODUCTION Spreadsheets are popular because they are easy to use and modify, and they support numerical data analysis without programming. A feature of modern spreadsheets is their capability to be extended; in particular custom functions may be incorporated into them, for example complex simulation functions and computational experiments. For these reasons spreadsheets make an ideal front-end f...