MATLAB Distributing Computing Server

Benefits of MDCS

MDCS, which is installed on our central HPC facilities, lets you submit both serial as well as parallel jobs to one of the clusters from within your local MATLAB session. There is no need to deal with SGE, or even to log-on to the HPC systems. The internal structure of the clusters is hidden, they merely act as a "black box" which is connected to your local machine and provides you with powerful computational resources. On the other hand, jobs submitted via MDCS are fully integrated into SGE, and have the same rights and privileges like any other SGE batch job. Thus there is no conflict between the MATLAB jobs und standard SGE batch jobs.

Using MDCS for MATLAB computations on the HPC facilities has a number of advantages:

• Simplified workflow for those who exclusively do their numerics with MATLAB
• License volume effectively doubled ...
• Calculations with more than 12 workers, Speed-up by parfor

Prerequisites

1. On your local machine (PC, workstation, notebook, ...), you must have one of the following MATLAB releases installed:
   R2010b
   R2011a
   R2011b
   It is important that the installation includes all toolboxes, in particular the Parallel Computing Toolbox (PCT). It is recommended to install MATLAB from the media provided by the IT Services on their website. In that case, all required components (including the PCT) are automatically installed.
2. You must install a couple of files into the directory
   matlabroot/toolbox/local
   (on a Unix/Linux system, analogously for Windows clients)
3. After these preparations, start a new MATLAB session and bring up the Parallel Configurations Manager by selecting Parallel -> Manage Configurations. Create a new "Generic Scheduler" Configuration (File -> New -> Generic):
   
   
   
   The following fields and boxes must be filled out:* Name

After these preliminaries, you are prepared for exploring the rich possibilities of distributed and parallel computing with MATLAB!

Old (non-MDCS) MATLAB usage

To submit a MATLAB job, you must first load the environment module in your submission script:

module load matlab

This automatically loads the newest version, if several versions are installed. After that, invoke MATLAB in batch mode:

matlab -nosplash -nodesktop -r mymatlab_input

where mymatlab_input.m (a so-called ".m-file") is an ASCII text file containing the sequence of MATLAB commands that you would normally enter in an interactive session.

Slides and links from last MATLAB workshop at the University of Oldenburg (19.02.2013)

Slides

• Slides of the Workshop

Links

• Parallel-Computing Toolbox
• Distributed Computing Server
• Distributed Computing Server Webinars
• Material for Academia

Documentation

• MATLAB Getting Started Guide
• Parallel Computing Toolbox User's Guide