ActiveSheets: Super-Computing with Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are important business tools. Increasingly they are being used for simulation e.g. to perform risk analysis. Such tasks have far greater computational demands than traditional spreadsheet bookkeeping applications. In this paper we show how spreadsheets can support supercomputing. This is achieved without requiring the spreadsheet user to have specialist tools or knowledge. The key technical innovation is a mechanism enabling the concurrent evaluation of spreadsheet functions. Furthermore the mechanism does not require modification of the standard spreadsheet evaluation engine.