Parallel Computing With MATLAB On Amazon EC2

Mathworks released a whitepaper on how to run MATLAB parallel computing products - Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on Amazon EC2. This step by step guide walks you through the steps of installation, configuration and setting up clustered environments using these licensed products from MathWorks on Amazon EC2. It shows how you can create an AMI with MATLAB products bundled in and run them in the cloud.

Whitepaper is available free on Mathworks website:

MATLAB users will learn about the key aspects of using the EC2 service from their desktop MATLAB session and using Parallel Computing Toolbox to send parallel MATLAB computations to the EC2 service.

System administrators will learn the key technical details required for setting up MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on the EC2 service, including licensing and network setup. They will also learn how to configure their users’ desktops to enable the use of the EC2 service for MATLAB computations.

This is the 'Era of Tera'. We have terabytes of data to compute. Data is never going to be less. Parallel Computing models are the answer to the future. Cloud Computing is making it easier for the masses.

I am very excited because this is going to open up powerful MATLAB tools to any developer for not only research but also production applications. Students might be able to do their lab exercises without a lab and impress their professors by turning in the assignments before time. Professors will be able to teach courses using MATLAB by "turning on" a switch that creates their "Instant Labs" for the duration of the course without even contacting the College IT department for resources. Enteprises might be able to crunch the complex BI data over the weekend for a monday morning meeting.

Also, Mathworks Consulting and Support is available for those who are starting up with a MATLAB project on Amazon EC2.

Do you have a cool MATLAB usecase?

-- Jinesh

Update: On licensing, MathWorks is aware of the requirement and would be willing to discuss this further with people that are interested in using MDCS on EC2.  please send us an email at evangelists at amazon d0t com with your usecase.

Comments

[Eric]

In this whitepaper I noticed that there was a mention of software licenses being a limiting factor in scaling the processing power using EC2

'You may also incur additional costs for software licenses. Users’ ability to scale applications may be limited by the number of available software licenses. For example, a MATLAB Distributed Computing Server license provides access to a certain number of workers. Once this pool of workers is exhausted, users must wait until the workers are released by computations other users are running.'

Is there any way that Matlab licenses can be handled on a usage basis, similar to how MS Windows or other paid AMI's work??? I think that would be an ideal solution for many users.

Thanks,
Eric

[justin b]

Does anyone have experience of engineering / setting up a stand alone .exe for numerical modelling to run on EC2 / S2. if so, please reply. I may have some contract work for you, especially if you are based in the UK.

[Paul Gribble]

Is there a way to run thousands of Matlab instances (either Workers under the Parallel Computing Toolbox, OR just standalone instances of Matlab) on EC2 without spending millions of dollars on Matlab licenses?? This seems financially infeasible for large computational problems...

http://gribblelab.org/2008/11/27/high-performance-computing-in-the-cloud-amazon-ec2-and-matlab/