Performance Studies for Multithreading in Matlab with Usage Instructions on hpc
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2009
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Abstract
This report explores the use of multiple computational cores by multithreading in the software package Matlab on a compute node with two dual-core AMD Opteron processors. After testing the built-in functions of Matlab for a small test problem, we consider a classical test problem resulting from a finite difference discretization of the Poisson equation in two spatial dimensions. The results demonstrate that the use of more than one thread is often not very beneficial for Matlab code. This suggests that Matlab jobs should be limited to using one core by default to allow for the fastest throughput of the largest number of jobs. The comparison of solving the same problem with a code using the source code language C indicates that Matlab uses more memory and takes longer; this has to be contrasted with the productivity gains possible of programming in Matlab. This report also provides detailed information on how to run Matlab jobs in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility.