Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Taking Excel to the Grid?

November 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Taking Excel to the Grid?

TAGS: Grid Computing

I have become obsessed with grid-ifying massive Excel models that we use for financial analysis. This is a very real business problem in financial, retail and anywhere you are doing serious data analysis. We have models that take hours to run thanks to Excel's single-threaded design and we at the point of bringing down servers. Consider this a plea for help-and don't give me the "you should cluster the servers" response. It's not that easy, I need some kind of conversion mechanism.

I am ready to start an open source company to tackle the need to go from Excel to something else in a grid-in-a-box type of situation. The goal would be to make it all hidden from the end-user who just wants to increase processing horsepower. I figure you make it open source and you'll get people to use it and add extensions to other apps. I think it could be built on Globus.

Let's start a company. I know lots of VCs. Email me if you are interested.

Comments and ideas are welcome.

Here are a few things that I have come across so far and why none of them really work for me:

Platform Computing and Data Synapse: Too expensive and require mucho pro services to get up and running-but they do solve the problem, essentially acting as a plug-in to Excel that distributes the workload.

Excel Grid: A .Net plugin that processes file onto a Grid with Gridbus middleware. A few problems: runs on Windows; development seems to have stalled; many other grid components needed.

Turbo Excel: Haven't tried it yet, but could be helpful. Turns excel into C++ so that computers can process faster. Seems like the best idea-now to do it on a Grid.

Clustering/Beowulf etc: Unfortunately requires developers (defeats my hidden from end-user goal) to redo applications.

Azul Systems: Love the idea of a compute appliance, but don't need Java processing.

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on November 29, 2005 08:04 PM

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