LibreOffice Calc Is Finally Being Threaded

While LibreOffice Calc for a while now has been offering OpenCL support for speeding up spreadsheet computations, with not all drivers/GPUs supporting OpenCL, this Microsoft Office alternative is finally receiving proper multi-threading support.

Collabora developers have landed their initial work on multi-threading / parallelism as they look to speed-up the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet program's calculations.

Tor Lillqvist and Dennis Francis of Collabora appear to be leading this charge. Their first stab at Calc parallelism notes that for now formula group calculations are done in parallel threads. This is done when OpenCL is not being used and the CPU_THREADED_CALCULATION is set. For now it's hidden behind an environment variable, but hopefully soon enough it will become the default.

Since that initial commit yesterday there have been several more patches getting this multi-threading calculation support into working shape including to thread the software interpreter and related work.

It will be interesting to see how well this multi-threaded Calc computations support is in time for the LibreOffice 6.0 release early next year.