Nimrod/O

Spreadsheets are important business tools. Increasingly they are being used for simulation e.g. to perform risk analysis. Such tasks have far greater computational demands than traditional spreadsheet bookkeeping applications.Spreadsheets can be used to support supercomputing. This is achieved without requiring the spreadsheet user to have specialist tools or knowledge.

ActiveSheets builds on Nimrod by adding a component based spread sheet interface for specifying computational experiments. We have chosen to use Microsoft Excel as the base spreadsheet application, and have used VBA and associated component technology to allow ActiveSheets to interface with Nimrod/G, EnFuzion and NetSolve.

The key technical innovation is a mechanism enabling the concurrent evaluation of spreadsheet functions. Furthermore, the mechanism does not require modification of the standard spreadsheet evaluation engine.