Client-side task support in matlab for concurrent distributed execution

Abstract

Matlab is a popular interactive computing environment that gives scientists a powerful and easy to use set of analysis and visualization tools. However, Matlab has been criticized for performance limitations on computationally and memory intensive applications. In addition, because of Matlab's single-threaded processing model, long-running processes prevent a user from performing other tasks while computation occurs. We discuss a framework for remote, concurrent execution of tasks in the Matlab environment that address these shortcomings by asynchronously distributing tasks to dedicated high-performance compute servers. We employ a client-server model based on web-standards and Matlab's built in scripting and Java environment.