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High performance spreadsheet simulation on a desktop grid

Published: 07 December 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We present a proof-of-concept prototype for high performance spreadsheet simulation called S3. Our goal is to provide a user-friendly, yet computationally powerful simulation environment for end users. Our approach is to add power of parallel computing on Windows-based desktop grid into popular Excel models. We show that, by using standard Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), one can build a fast and efficient system on a desktop grid for simulation. The complexity of parallelism can be hidden from users through a well-defined computation template. This work also demonstrates that a massive computing power can be harvested by linking off-the-shelf office PCs into a desktop grid for simulation. The experimental results show that the prototype system is highly scalable. In the best case, the execution time can be reduced 13.6 times using 16 desktop PCs; the simulation time is dramatically reduced from 200 minutes to 14 minutes.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
WSC '08: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation
December 2008
3189 pages
ISBN:9781424427086

Sponsors

  • IIE: Institute of Industrial Engineers
  • INFORMS-SIM: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences: Simulation Society
  • ASA: American Statistical Association
  • IEEE/SMC: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
  • SIGSIM: ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling
  • NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology
  • (SCS): The Society for Modeling and Simulation International

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Winter Simulation Conference

Publication History

Published: 07 December 2008

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WSC08
Sponsor:
  • IIE
  • INFORMS-SIM
  • ASA
  • IEEE/SMC
  • SIGSIM
  • NIST
  • (SCS)
WSC08: Winter Simulation Conference
December 7 - 10, 2008
Florida, Miami

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WSC '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 249 of 304 submissions, 82%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 3,413 of 5,075 submissions, 67%

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