Excel and High performance computing

From Microsoft Technet

Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 integrates with Microsoft® Excel® 2010 to help run workbooks and user-defined functions (UDFs) faster by offloading calculations to the cluster. If a workbook contains independent units of calculation, multiple compute nodes can perform the calculations simultaneously. Parallel computation can significantly reduce workbook calculation time and make calculations across larger data sets more feasible. Many complex and long-running workbooks run iteratively—that is, they perform a single calculation many times over different sets of input data. These workbooks might contain complex Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) functions or calculation intensive XLL add-ins. This type of workbook is suitable for cluster acceleration.

Speaking as someone that spends his working days trying to make the world safe from Excel misuse, this is just fucking wrong.