14 DAY TRIAL // For customers overwhelmed by the increase in complexity of the calculations and models associated with Office Excel 2010 in business intelligence (BI) scenarios, Microsoft is recommending integration with high performance machines running the latest iteration of Windows for supercomputers. The Redmond company even made available for download the “Accelerating Microsoft Office Excel 2010 with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2” Technical Overview, a resource offered free of charge.
As the label implies, the software giant is simply lending a helping hand to customers that need extra horsepower for their Excel 2010 workbooks and critical user-defined functions (UDFs).
Microsoft promises that leveraging Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 will be equivalent with a significant boot in terms of performance, as long as Office Excel 2010 workbooks and critical (UDFs) are executed on in a Windows high-performance computing (HPC) cluster.
“With a wealth of statistical analysis functions, support for constructing complex analyses, and broad extensibility, Microsoft Office Excel 2010 is the tool of choice for analyzing business data,” Microsoft reveals.
“As models grow larger and workbooks become more complex, the value of the information generated increases. However, more complex workbooks also require more time to calculate."
“For complex analyses, it is not uncommon for users to spend hours, days, or even weeks completing such complex workbooks,” the company added.
The white paper is designed to show organizations how to dramatically reduce the calculation time required for long-running workbooks.
According to Microsoft, there are more ways than one to take advantage of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 in order to scale Office Excel 2010 calculations across multiple nodes.
Customers will need to be running an environment with a Windows high-performance computing (HPC) cluster in parallel, the company said.
The technical overview provided by Microsoft is focused on three main scenarios, involving Office Excel 2010 workbooks and a single cluster; but also running Excel 2010 UDFs in a cluster; and in addition, leveraging Excel 2010 as a cluster service-oriented architecture (SOA) client.
“Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 now enables running multiple instances of Office Excel 2010 in a Windows HPC cluster, where each instance is running an independent calculation or iteration of the same workbook with a different dataset or parameters,” Microsoft explained.
“This solution allows near-linear performance increases for iterative spreadsheets, such as those running a Monte Carlo algorithm.”
Office Home and Business 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.
Office Home and Student 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.
Office Professional 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite Evaluation is available for download here.