High performance spreadsheet simulation on a desktop grid

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.