Microsoft Office Excel 2007 has vastly expanded capabilities – over one million rows by 16,384 columns – and its capacity to boost individual productivity and calculation performance have already received much acclaim. For large financial firms, there is an even greater potential. Excel 2007 has evolved from a standalone desktop application to one that can participate in a client/server world, available to users within an enterprise as well as users outside the enterprise in a scale-out scenario. What’s more, with the new multi-threaded recalculation engine, which accelerates calculations and takes advantage of parallel threads across multi-processor machines, the power of high-performance computing is now accessible.

The driver behind this evolution is the fact that the desktop is not always fast enough. Excel has become a mission-critical application for many large firms in decision support systems. In recognition of that status, Excel 2007 has been designed so that when used with the proper technology, the execution of mission-critical applications can be guaranteed and performance can be maximized through parallel iterations of models or in long-running calculations. Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and its Excel Services, combined with Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 enables large financial firms to tap this potential.

Office SharePoint Server 2007

Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes a set of Excel Services that are specifically designed for providing a server-based version of Excel in a SharePoint environment. The enterprise content management features of SharePoint Server 2007, along with Excel Services’ Web-enabled spreadsheets, enables broad sharing of spreadsheets securely. Spreadsheet authors can maintain a “single version of the truth” and protect proprietary information while at the same time still sharing the actual spreadsheets.

With Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services, spreadsheet authors can create fully interactive Web-based data-bound worksheets, including charts, tables and PivotTable views without any custom coding. There are also rich interactive dashboards that can be assembled quickly and can display information from disparate sources using built-in Web parts.

The way it works is that a spreadsheet author can design and author a spreadsheet and save it to SharePoint Server 2007, where it will be stored in a document library. There, SharePoint can retrieve and cache external data. The spreadsheet can then be viewed and interacted with from a browser according to whatever parameters the author has set for its viewing.

The level of control that spreadsheet owners have with Excel Services adds a new level of usefulness for sharing spreadsheets within and outside company walls. With Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services, spreadsheet owners can limit which users can view spreadsheets and what users can view, protecting the underlying data and models and safeguarding sensitive information. The spreadsheets can be opened in Excel for a snapshot or for rich exploration and analysis.

As part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Excel Services also takes advantage of enterprise content management features like version control, check-in/check-out for information provisioning, auditing for a trail of usage and edits and management of retention policies and schedules.

Excel Services provides both a Web-based UI for browser-based access and a Web services API for programmatic access.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003

For the ultimate level of spreadsheet performance and reliability, Excel can be offloaded from a desktop to a Windows cluster. This gives users the ability to execute parallel tasks across multiple machines for faster results. It also introduces a higher level of reliability, through job monitoring and failover. This is ideal for Excel spreadsheets with multiple independent formulas or calculations that can be performed in parallel, or for spreadsheets that need to be computed over and over with different inputs, such as Monte Carlo simulations or a parametric sweep.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 runs high performance jobs securely, reliably and transparently. Integration with Active Directory allows jobs to run under the submitting user’s security context, with the ability to access data residing on the corporate network with the same authentication and authorization structure the application uses on the user’s workstation.

With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the user stages data into a shared file system or the database. The user then submits jobs to the job scheduler, which then allocates idle resources for the job. Once allocated, multiple tasks are dispatched to the allocated nodes, and in the end execution times are reduced.

Once scheduled, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 will perform proactive monitoring of the Excel calculations running in SharePoint Server 2007. If necessary, the scheduler can automate the re-queuing of failed jobs, maintain priority of queues, provide adaptive load balancing to prevent overloading any single SharePoint Server, and provide dynamic aggregation and discovery of cluster nodes. This results in a reliable and fault tolerant foundation for spreadsheet calculations. These spreadsheets can be further managed in SharePoint document libraries to maintain a single, secure historical record.

In the financial services world, where many financial firms routinely conduct complex calculations that take considerable time to compute, like Monte Carlo simulation or parametric sweeps, high-performance computing can effectively replace batch processing. Aside from the fact that the data will be available more quickly when calculations run in parallel, this intraday model also avoids situations where an error may have occurred overnight on a batch job and might not have been uncovered until morning.

The Sum of the Parts

For customers who need to solve complex computational problems, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 provides a high-performance computing platform that is simple to deploy, operate, and integrate with the existing infrastructure. Office SharePoint Server 2007, with its Excel Services, promotes the advantages of Excel as well as the advantages of Windows Compute Cluster Server. Excel, long the standard in the financial services world for data analysis and the construction of financial models, is now more powerful, user friendly, and equipped to take advantage of these enterprise technologies.

The exponential growth in the amount of data that financial firms must process has been a continuing challenge. Investment scenarios are becoming increasingly complex and the market pace isn’t slowing down. Coupling Excel with Microsoft’s High-Performance Computing platform allows users to continue to build financial models quickly, to securely share them with colleagues of their choice, and to deploy them to process massive amounts of data reliably in an intraday model.

Together, Excel 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 provide an enterprise-class solution for spreadsheet performance and reliability. When used with Windows Compute Cluster Server, Excel 2007 can scale-out for faster spreadsheet calculation, fault tolerance, and guaranteed execution of jobs. Meanwhile, when used with SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services, Excel 2007 can also scale-up, becoming a shared business intelligence tool for firms, and harnessing the power of 64-bit computing with secure, centrally managed spreadsheets.