Hello Maho-san, On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 12:34 +0900, Maho NAKATA wrote: > http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10398590-56.html > > > At a key supercomputing conference on Monday, Microsoft released > > a test version of its Excel spreadsheet redesigned to run on powerful > > clusters of servers. > > Very interesting news to me. I didn't attend SC09, though. > > > By engineering Excel to run better on such clusters Microsoft said that > > customers are seeing spreadsheets that normally would take weeks to > > calculate > > now run in a few hours. > > I'm not sure what was done in the calculation, though, I assmue a lot of > matrix-matrix, matrix-vector manipuation were performed.
I wondered about this too. The article really doesn't touch on the specifics of the type of calculations performed. But as I understand most parallel computing needs are centered around matrix calculations (as you said). I also assume that the article talks about speeding up Excel's worksheet functions (aka cell functions), especially the matrix functions, instead of some isolated computation routines such as solver. > I assume Excel might use BLAS, LAPACK and ScaLAPACK for such kind of things. > > I like GotoBLAS, the fastest BLAS and partial LAPACK implemntation, but > it is not a free software. ATLAS is a free software though, it tunes itself > while building. So, I know little about parallel computing or clustered computing, and I do know that this is your area of expertise. With that in mind, I'd like to ask you this question. How can an application make use of clustered computers to perform parallel computations? Is there any library that takes care of the complexity of sending/receiving computation requests to multiple machines? It's sort of my pet peeves to make Calc more appealing to the scientific community, but unfortunately I don't have enough expertise to follow through with that. So, I would much like someone to educate me in this area. Thanks, Kohei -- Kohei Yoshida - OpenOffice.org Engineer - Novell, Inc. <[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
