Resolver One and Digipede

We kicked off the beta programme for version 1.5 of Resolver One today. It's got some really cool new features, including a console that lets you interact with your spreadsheets from a command-line-style interface, but there's one other change, a tiny one that enables something really interesting -- a combination of the spreadsheet's ease-of-programming with seriously parallel computing that I don't think is really possible with other tools.

We've been in touch with Digipede since Dan Ciruli, their Director of Products, blogged about Resolver One in January 2008. The Digipede Network is a system that allows you to easily code .NET programs that run on a grid of computers -- and he'd set up a Resolver One spreadsheet that was able to call into code running on a Digipede Network to perform part of its calculations, which was particularly impressive given that he only needed to spend five minutes or so putting it together. Looking at what he'd done, I found myself asking "wouldn't it be even cooler if the thing you ran on your compute farm was itself a spreadsheet?"

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