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Windows HPC Server 2008 R2: HPC Services for Excel

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Updated: June 2011

Applies To: Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 integrates with Microsoft® Excel® 2010 to help run workbooks and user-defined functions (UDFs) faster by offloading calculations to the cluster. If a workbook contains independent units of calculation, multiple compute nodes can perform the calculations simultaneously. Parallel computation can significantly reduce workbook calculation time and make calculations across larger data sets more feasible. Many complex and long-running workbooks run iteratively—that is, they perform a single calculation many times over different sets of input data. These workbooks might contain complex Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) functions or calculation intensive XLL add-ins. This type of workbook is suitable for cluster acceleration.

The HPC Services for Excel features support a number of programming models that enable Excel workbooks to run in parallel on a cluster. The features include service-oriented architecture (SOA) clients and services that enable developers to quickly convert workbooks to run on a cluster. The client-side and developer features are available in the Microsoft® HPC Pack 2008 R2 client utilities and software development kit (SDK). The cluster-side features are available with the Enterprise Edition of HPC Pack 2008 R2.

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