Introduction to Parallel MATLAB at Virginia Tech

This document describes the materials made available as part of the class "Introduction to Parallel MATLAB at Virginai Tech", presented through Virginia Tech's Faculty Development Institute (FDI) in 3060 Torgersen Hall, on 8 February 2010, from 1pm to 4:30pm.

This material will be available in a folder on the desktop of your machine, but it will also be made available on the web at "http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~burkardt/examples/parallel_matlab/parallel_matlab.html"

This class was taught by

• John Burkardt, ARC/ICAM;
• Gene Cliff, AOE/ICAM.

Exercises

A few in-class exercises are described in the file exercises.html.

Some Reference Documents

• distcomp.pdf the MathWorks User Guide for the Parallel Computing Toolbox.
• ithaca.html a short description of Virginia Tech's Ithaca cluster.
• matlab_remote_submission.pdf explains the steps necessary to set up communication between a desktop machine and the Ithaca cluster.
• parallel_matlab_2010.pdf the slides used for today's presentation.
• parallel_matlab_2010_6up.pdf the slides used for the presentation, 6 to a page (suitable for printing).

Some Example Programs

• fdi_opt, code for the optimization problem.
• jtb_codist, code for the heat equation example using codistributed arrays.
• knapsack_remote code for the knapsack problem, which uses distributed computing;
• md_parallel, code for the molecular dynamics problem using PARFOR;
• prime_number_parallel, code for the prime number problem using PARFOR;
• quad_spmd, code for the quadrature problem using SPMD;

A Test Suite

The directory matlab_distcomp contains a batch script test_all and a number of subdirectories. Executing test_all runs 5 separate test programs on Ithaca, using the batch command.

The directory mathworks_pct_lecture_and_examples contains the slides used for a MathWorks presentation on parallel MATLAB, given last week. There are two subdirectories of example codes for ODE's and for optimization.