Microsoft Tries to Make Computers More Super (Excel running on 1000 PC's in parallel)

Wall Street Journal ^ | May 17, 2010 | Nick Wingfield

[reaganaut1]

Microsoft has formed a new group to better its share of the market for the most powerful computers in the world. Its plan of attack: make the machines easier to use.

On Monday, Microsoft said it has created an effort called the Technical Computing Initiative focused on the field of high-performance computing, in which dozens to thousands of PCs are lashed together to jointly perform complex calculations beyond the capacity of individual machines. Microsoft has quietly staffed up the group with several hundred employees and is launching a marketing push with a new website touting trends in high-performance computing.

While most people will never come close to needing a high-performance computer, they’re key to the design of a lot of everyday products. They help engineers simulate the impact of wind shear on airplanes and scientists to discover new drugs. Hedge-funds feed mountains of data into them to develop trading strategies.

...

Well, not everyone exactly since high-performance computing applications will still require a lot of technical know-how. Muglia offers an example of how Microsoft plans to make high-performance computing more accessible: Today many financial services firms use the company’s Excel spreadsheet application to develop financial models, but if the firms need the power of a supercomputer to crunch numbers, they often have to write specialized applications in programming languages like Fortran that a much smaller group of users are fluent in.

Microsoft’s Technical Computing group is working on software that will allow a program like Excel to run in parallel on thousands of machines so the application can be used to tackle monster financial computing chores on its own, Muglia says.

[reaganaut1]

Good grief. Excel is a fine interactive program, but instead of figuring out how to run spreadsheets fast over a thousand machines in parallel, it's better to put the computationally intensive parts in C or Fortran using a DLL or something and use Excel as the interface, not the engine.

[Paladin2]

I’ve never had a problem running Excel on a single computer.

[DonaldC]

This is what happens I guess when a product is essentially as mature as it’s going to get and the dev team is looking for something to do...hehe

[Paladin2]

Excel has had resolution problems if one was using numbers smaller than integers.

[bamahead]

ping

[unixfox]

Its plan of attack: make the machines easier to use.

How bout starting with making it easier to see ALL computers in a heterogenous network!

For the life of me I don't know why they think they have to change networking on every new g-damn version of Windows.

[Red Badger]

...will allow a program like Excel to run in parallel on thousands of machines so the application can be used to tackle monster financial computing chores

...like computing the NATIONAL DEBT AND THE DEFICIT SIMULTANEOUSLY!..................

[JRandomFreeper]

I was going to ask if they fixed the math first before starting the massively parallel pi$$-poor processing.

/johnny

[Proud_texan]

Hello SkyNet....

[longtermmemmory]

sorry microsoft but cloud computing is security unacceptable

[GingisK]

I’d be happy to see their software work well on just one computer.

[Sudetenland]

That’s always been my objection to it. I’m not certain I would want all of my data spread across a bunch of computers I don’t control.

[SERKIT]

Old reliable - Blue Screen of Life!

[longtermmemmory]

imagine a brokerage firm using cloud computer and a hacker creates a crash by just infesting one computer in the cloud.

[Disambiguator]

This is the most amazing parallel processing setup known to mankind.

[Paladin2]

I have no idea. I'm just speaking from experiences from the "old daze".

I wuz using Excel to do some numerical modeling and couldn't explain to my boss why there were these oscillations as things approached Zer0. Later I found out that M$ had pimped me.

[TChris]

Microsoft Excel: Errors, Faults and Fixes

[Fido969]

You’re against bloatware!

Communist!

[Paladin2]

I have both a Furby and a pet rock. They do not exist in the computer lab/electronics lab that constitutes my grown daughters’ bedroom though.

[JRandomFreeper]

Some linux distros have a problem with advanced floating point routines. They quietly fail and fall back on (MUCH slower) kernel FP. Try explaining to your boss that your laptop can run the FP calcs twice as fast as the new, shiny server with a flakey distro. ;)

/johnny