Improving the Performance of a Large Scale Spreadsheet

A Case Study

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

A.A.S. Swidan Software Engineering -

F.F.J. Hermans Software Engineering -

Ruben Koesoemowidjojo BiTbrains IT Services BV

Research Group

Software Engineering () (TU Delft)

High-performance Simulation models Large-scale Spreadsheet optimization

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0a4e6ed8-2e18-4ec1-bcc7-815be4659ee8

More Info

expand_more

Published Date

23-05-2016

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Spreadsheets are used extensively for calculations in several domains, especially in finance and insurance. Spreadsheets offer a clear benefit to their users: they are an easy to learn application in which to express their business needs, however, there are downsides too. Like software, spreadsheets can have a long life span in which they are used by several people. This leads to maintainability issues, including errors, but also often to issues with performance. In this paper we present a case study in which a model for shortfall calculations, originally implemented in a spreadsheet, was adapted to run on an HPC cluster. We present the design, analysis and implementation of the solution which clearly improved the performance of the spreadsheet, with a factor of 50 in some cases. We subsequently reflect on challenges related to reverse engineering, testing and scalability. Finally, we identify opportunities that would provide automatic support to refactoring, dependency recognition and performance profiling in future spreadsheet optimization projects.