Offloading Excel Workbooks to Clusters

 

Make a workbook calculation in a distributed environment.. Windows HP Server make it possible. Here are the different
project type you can build on Excel 2010:

- Workbook with VBA code: the code will be modified to work on compute nodes
- UDF : C/C+ XLL are user defined functions loaded on compute nodes and merged in a single workbook.
- VSTO application. An Excel Add-In will comunicate with a head node and broker. The broker will call a WCF Web Service on each compute node.

To make an Excel 2010 workbook work on HPC Server, you may follow these steps:

1/ Identify the portion of your code corresponding to an iteration
2/ Localize the code that make he merge of your data
3/ Find the best approach to get the input and the output data

Here is an architecture of the solution:

image

Go to the following links to have more information:

Basic information
https://www.microsoft.com/hpc/en/us/product/cluster-computing.aspx

TechNet Virtual Lab: Scaling out VBA enabled Excel Workbooks with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2
https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=d04c2e6d-e15a-448f-93ff-3eeff7218c07

TechNet Virtual Lab: Scheduling Jobs with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2
https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=f41f9b1b-416b-4ca2-839e-aa3bbbb410af

HPC Pack 2008 R2 SDK with Service Pack 1
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9BFA085B-7A0D-49BC-8D4A-CFC11C63FEF9