It was estimated there would be 72 million users using spreadsheets monthly in 2017 some of which build complex financial, scientific, and mathematical models. Most of these end-users are not trained IT professionals but domain experts. In the age of multicore computing and ever-increasing amounts of data, how can end-users access this powerful, parallel hardware to accelerate spreadsheet computation? Some existing solutions are usually not fully automatic and require a level of interaction from end-users to facilitate parallel execution. Ideally, an end-user tool would transparently exploit the underlying hardware and automatically discover available parallelism in the spreadsheet without any required interaction. This article presents an algorithm for automatic parallel evaluation of the cells in a spreadsheet and dynamic, parallel cycle detection. It is implemented in the Funcalc research spreadsheet application which supports higher-order functions in the spreadsheet paradigm. Altogether, this promises a powerful and expressive platform for end-user development. Our results on a 48 logical core machine show a maximum 7–14× speed-up on a set of benchmark spreadsheets and a maximum 21–32× speed-up on a set of synthetic spreadsheets with predefined topologies.

中文翻译：

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并行电子表格评估和动态循环检测

据估计，2017 年每月将有 7200 万用户使用电子表格，其中一些用户会构建复杂的金融、科学和数学模型。大多数这些最终用户不是受过培训的 IT 专业人员，而是领域专家。在多核计算和数据量不断增加的时代，最终用户如何访问这种强大的并行硬件来加速电子表格计算？一些现有的解决方案通常不是全自动的，需要来自最终用户的一定程度的交互以促进并行执行。理想情况下，最终用户工具将透明地利用底层硬件并自动发现电子表格中可用的并行性，而无需任何交互。本文介绍了一种自动并行评估电子表格中的单元格和动态的算法，并行循环检测。它在 Funcalc 研究电子表格应用程序中实现，该应用程序支持电子表格范例中的高阶函数。总而言之，这为最终用户开发提供了一个强大而富有表现力的平台。我们在 48 个逻辑核心机器上的结果显示，在一组基准电子表格上的最大加速为 7-14 倍，在一组具有预定义拓扑的合成电子表格上的最大加速为 21-32 倍。