Vetted in several customer implementations, the solution cuts calculation times in half or better, by fully exploiting the parallelization capabilities of innovative multi-core hardware architectures.

ACCELLERANT 4.1 for Excel contains an automated wizard and API enabling the easy parallelization of VBA functionality to seamlessly run in parallel, without re-engineering the application's flow or algorithmic content. This marks a clear step up over common lengthy and costly application re-writes necessary to exploit desktop multi-core capacity without ACCELLERANT.

Several benchmark runs of both long running calculations and short Excel-based recalculations displayed consistent performance enhancements when exploiting multi-core environments:

• 87 percent elapsed run time reduction on the Intel Xeon 5300 2.66 GHz Quad Core Dual Processor
• 75 percent run time reduction on the Intel Xeon 5100 2.66GHz Dual Core Dual Processor
• 50 percent run time reduction on the Intel Xeon Centrino Duo 2GHz Processor

"ACCELLERANT for Excel can be a big difference maker - as most organizations consistently rely on Excel serious spreadsheet calculations for high profile, time-sensitive business results - with applications ranging from risk management, pricing, decision support and reporting fundamental business metrics," said Kurt Ziegler, evp of product development for ASPEED. "Early adopters are already seeing marked time reductions - in most cases, reducing long-running applications by 4-8 hours and cutting short recalculations in half to 1/8 of the time, enabling more "what ifs" in the same time."

Full VBA and C/C++ Support Makes Calculations Faster - and Better

The addition of VBA support is the latest in a series of application environment expansions enabling desktop applications to quickly leverage multi-core and multi-processor desktop and laptop environments. Once ASPEED's ACCELLERANT is applied to the application, it can immediately take advantantage of server, workgroup, cluster and grid configurations if the capacity is needed to bring the elapsed time down further.

ACCELLERANT 4.1 for Excel provides a comprehensive and flexible solution to significantly improve the elapsed times of long-running workbooks, or simply decrease the time for frequent short calculations. Users can seamlessly leverage their existing VBA and C/C++ based EXCEL programs while significantly reducing elapsed times using multi-core or multiple systems.

For the VBA implementation, the ACCELLERANT System Developer Kit (SDK) provides a wizard that inserts an annotated template into existing Excel/VBA workbooks, making it especially easy for developers to apply the ACCELLERANT ActiveX-based API. This masks the underlying plumbing and logistics required to launch and manage multiple instances of the parallelized calculation from the program. Once it is applied in the VBA script, the workbook can run invoking the ACCELLERANT run-time library, initiating the parallelization and managing the execution in real-time to ensure optimum performance and robustness.

As added functionality, the ACCELLERANT for Excel SDK provides random number generator functions specifically designed to provide consistent computational results independent of the level of parallelization used. The SDK includes functions for Sobol and Halton quasi-random number sequences and generation of multidimensional Sobol sequences. These functions are provided in a Windows DLL, so they are also immediately available for use with any Windows-based applications using ACCELLERANT.

ACCELLERANT for Excel is available as a package including the SDK and run-time licenses for up to five systems. Existing ASPEED clients will receive the ACCELLERANT for Excel 4.1 SDK as an update to their ACCELLERANT SDK. Enterprise pricing is also available.