posted on August 5, 2014
UPDATE (posted August 19, 2014): The demo license was extended until September 17. Contact Evan Bollig (boll0107@umn.edu) to participate in the demo.
MSI has deployed a demo of the MATLAB Distributed Compute Server (MDCS), which allows MATLAB jobs to launch parfor and SIMD loops across multiple nodes on Itasca. With MDCS there is no need to run pbsdsh or another parallel shell environment to span nodes. Also, jobs can be interactive or batched, and are controlled from within the MATLAB UI. More information about the software can be found on the MathWorks website.
MSI users are invited to test this demo and provide feedback. Please email Evan Bollig at boll0107@umn.edu to get a settings file and instructions if you wish to participate. The demo license expires on August 24, and MATLAB jobs running on Itasca will burn SUs at the standard rate of 1.5 CPU hours per SU scaled by the size of your job. (So, using this demo assumes you have enough SUs.) The demo has a 256 concurrent process limit (i.e., 32 nodes), shared by all users.
Your feedback and interest will help MSI decide whether the MDCS is worth pursuing. We would also like to know the upper limit on job size that you need.
Contact Evan (boll0107@umn.edu) with any questions.