Hi Eric, On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 09:25 +0100, Erich Neuwirth wrote: > Hello, > Excel 2007 already does parallel computing. > A spreadsheet program internally creates a dependency graph > of the cells. A dependency graph also knows which parts > of a complex calculation are not dependent on each other, > and therefore can be run in parallel.
Gotcha. So Excel's formula calculation is already multi-threaded. This is an area we should still work on to improve with Calc. > Excel 2007 does this parallel computing on different cores > on multicore machines. Using different machines > in a cluster is a technical change, but all the concepts > are already implemented if you can do it on a multicore machine. Right. So, clustered computation is a natural extension to threaded computation, as the two share similar characteristics. Having said that, I was more interested in the specifics of what framework people typically use to distribute computation requests to multiple machines, and whether that is API-compatible with threaded computation (or can be made to be API-compatible). My thinking is that, we should probably create abstraction layer so that Calc doesn't need to know whether we are calculating multi-threaded on a single machine or over the network. And I was interested to see whether or not a solution for that already exists, that is, whether there is already a framework or a library that takes care of abstracting them. Of course, since the formula calculation is the heart of spreadsheet application, the less overhead the better. Kohei -- Kohei Yoshida - OpenOffice.org Engineer - Novell, Inc. <[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
