Grid Connectors are software products that we develop together with our business and academic partners in order to grid-enable a third-party software application or process, so it can benefit from Grid technology. Connectors provide a powerful and easy-to-use tool that unifies the advantages of grid technology and the capabilities of an existing application.

Grid Connectors interact with processes that are time-consuming, require large amounts of processing power, or require a layer of application virtualization to make then more agile, robust and independent on the resource layer. A Grid Connector links the execution of such processes to all the resources available in the grid by working as a translator; a connector understands how an application works, can read and interpret its input, and is able to bridge the application and the Grid technology in order to break this input into one or many independent pieces that can be processed in parallel. This entire procedure is completely transparent to the end-user.

• The spreadsheet Microsoft Excel
• The data integration software DataStage from IBM/Ascential
• The mathematical program Matlab
• The business analytic software SAS
• Many connectors for the internal applications of financial, telecommunication and other industries, from Risk Analytics to ETL and data management processes

A spreadsheet is a highly interactive computer program designed to work on number manipulation. One of the most popular spreadsheet applications is Excel by Microsoft. In some industries, Excel users perform complex calculations that are very time-consuming and require powerful computers to get the results in a reasonable amount of time. Fura provides a powerful and easy-to-use tool that unifies the advantages of Grid technology and the capabilities of Excel calculation by partitioning and distributing computational tasks among resources in a grid of arbitrary size.

The Excel Connector installs an Excel add-in that enables distributing the calculation of a selected range of cells over the Grid. Each cell is converted into a Fura microtask that is sent to and executed by a Grid node. When the calculation is done, the results are collected and appear in the user’s workbook as if the calculation had been performed locally in that computer. All the power of InnerGrid is available to the final user with just a few mouse clicks.