Accelerating Excel® 2010 with Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2: Building .NET Applications that Run Excel Calculations on a Windows HPC Cluster

Note: Article and samples were updated for the RC release of Windows HPC 2008 R2. For more information about updating Excel solutions from Beta 2 to RC, see the Excel Workbook Offloading Beta Transition Guide.

HPC Services for Excel supports a number of programming models for developing and running Excel calculations on a Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 cluster. To help distribute independent units of calculation onto a cluster and merge the results into the workbook, HPC Services for Excel provides a framework which allows VBA macros to define how calculations are to be partitioned and their results merged. Additional .NET APIs allow implementation of more complex calculation patterns.

In this article, we’ll build a stand-alone .NET application which runs an example securities pricing workbook on a Windows HPC 2008 R2 cluster. The example in this article uses Excel Automation to launch and control an Excel process. If you’re not familiar with Excel Automation or controlling Excel from C#, we’ll walk through the development steps.

The associated zip file includes:

• Sample solutions for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft.Hpc.Excel.dll
• A sample securities pricing workbook

Note: The workbook contain macros. When you open the workbook, you may see a security warning indicating that the macros have been disabled. You can enable the macros by clicking "Enable Content".

Note: Microsoft provides programming examples for illustration only, without warranty either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

Supported Operating Systems

Windows HPC Server 2008

Microsoft Word of Word Viewer, Microsoft Excel 2010, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 cluster, Visual Studio 2008 or 2010