Promotion Engine Offloads Spreadsheet Calculations to Cloud
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Solution Overview
Problem
Consumer-level software applications often struggle with large-scale computation-intensive tasks, such as 1000x1000 cell spreadsheets, due to insufficient computing throughput and data transfer limitations of desktop processors, leading to system bogging or crashes.
Innovation Solution
A networked promotion engine detects high-load computations and transfers the computational task to cloud-based resources, utilizing a cloud management system to instantiate virtual machines with scalable processing power, allowing on-demand access to greater computational resources.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Power
If consumer spreadsheet applications are used for large-scale computations, then ease of operation is maintained, but computing throughput is insufficient causing system bogging or crashes
Solution Approach 1:
A promotion engine acts as an intermediary between the consumer spreadsheet application and cloud-based computation resources. The engine detects when computation thresholds are exceeded and automatically promotes the computational workload to cloud resources, allowing the local application to remain simple while leveraging remote computing power for large-scale calculations
Solution Approach 2:
The system transitions computation from a single-dimension local processor to a multi-dimensional distributed cloud infrastructure. By moving computational tasks across the network to remote data centers with specialized hardware, the system accesses additional computational dimensions beyond what a consumer desktop can provide
2Power
If cloud-based computation resources are used for large-scale computations, then computing throughput is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The promotion engine implements self-service by automatically detecting when computational thresholds are exceeded and autonomously managing the promotion of workloads to cloud resources. This automation eliminates the need for users to manually configure complex cloud connections or monitor system performance, keeping the interface simple while providing access to distributed computing power
3Productivity
If cloud-based computation resources are used for large-scale computations, then productivity is improved, but loss of time for data transfer increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-configuring cloud resource connections and pre-processing data where possible before promotion. The promotion engine prepares the computational environment in advance and establishes data transfer pipelines beforehand, reducing the actual transfer time when computations need to be promoted to the cloud
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments relate to systems and methods for the promotion of calculations to cloud-based computation resources. One or more applications, such as spreadsheet applications, can prepare the calculation of a relatively large-scale computation, such as running statistical reports on large (e.g., greater than 1000 by 1000 cell) spreadsheets or other data objects. If the pending calculation is determined to be greater than a computation threshold for instance in computation intensity or data size, a computation request can be sent to a promotion engine. The promotion engine can identify a set of computation resources located in a cloud or other network and transmit the data request and subject data to the set of computation resources, which afford greater computation speed than the local machine hosting the requesting application. A set of results is returned from the cloud to the requesting application, thereby creating higher bandwidth and faster calculation times for the user.