Welcome to the Excel Services and Excel 2007 Windows Compute Cluster Server Job Submission Sample Developer Guide

  • Article

The Excel Services and Excel 2007 Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003 Job Submission Sample Developer Guide shows you how to build an integrated solution to improve the performance and reliability of Microsoft Office Excel 2007 workbooks. The sample demonstrates how you can use a compute cluster to improve workbook performance when running a parametric sweep by using Windows CCS 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Note

This developer guide assumes that you are familiar with Excel Services and Windows CCS 2003. For more information about both, see Additional Resources.

Using an Excel 2007 workbook, you create a model and then use a set of parameters to iterate through it to create an aggregate of results by "sweeping" through the list of parameters, such as is performed in a Monte Carlo simulation. This operation is often performed on a single workstation, which can be long-running and compute-intensive, resulting in calculations that take minutes, hours, or even days to complete. A server farm of 64-bit computers running Office SharePoint Server and Excel Services within a compute cluster, however, can perform the calculations in parallel. This can dramatically reduce the completion time.

Download Sample

The download sample that accompanies this developer guide—the Excel Services and Excel 2007 Windows Compute Cluster Server Job Submission Sample and its supporting files—demonstrates how you can use a compute cluster to improve workbook performance when running a parametric sweep.

The sample shows you how to provide an end user with access to the compute cluster through a custom Excel task pane add-in or a Web form that can be opened through a SharePoint document library shortcut menu. This Excel Services and Excel 2007 Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) Job Submission task pane—is a custom interface hosted within Excel 2007 that provides the end user with the ability to perform immediate, or scheduled, Excel calculations across the compute cluster. The Web form is a standard ASP.NET 2.0 application that uses the Windows CCS API to provide functionality similar to the task pane from a Web client.

The Excel Services and Excel 2007 Windows CCS Job Submission sample allows rapid calculation of workbooks with hundreds of inputs, and thousands of parameters per input. Using the compute cluster, you can significantly reduce the time to return results that would otherwise take hours to calculate on a desktop computer.

In this Guide

  • Getting Started
    Introduces the Excel Services and Excel 2007 Windows Compute Cluster Server Job Submission sample and task pane add-in. Includes an overview of the Excel Calculation Services on Compute Cluster Server API.
  • Walkthrough and How Tos
    Shows you how to create a parametric sweep, schedule a workbook calculation, and schedule and submit a workbook.