Prototyping Your Parallel Functions

Before you start submitting your new functions to the cluster and wait in the queue for your job only to return with errors, you can prototype your code on your desktop (if you purchased the parallel computing toolbox) or on the login nodes with up to four workers, interactively or non-interactively. To open up an interactive window with 2 - 4 workers, type the following at the Matlab command prompt:

pmode start local 4

To start 2 - 4 background workers on the login node, type the following at the Matlab command prompt:

matlabpool local 4

Please note that there is a limitation with prototyping because not everything you do in Matlabpool or pmode using the Parallel Computing Toolbox translates to the same result on the cluster (although it should). With pmode, you can use both parfor and labindex functions (although there is no current way to implement this submitting Matlab jobs to the cluster).