MATLAB at TACC

Last update: June 8, 2023

Mathwork's MATLAB is installed and supported at TACC and is available on the following TACC resources: Frontera, Stampede2 and Lonestar6.

Licenses

MathWork's agreement with the University of Texas now allows TACC users to access MATLAB for non-commercial, academic use. If you would like access to MATLAB submit a help desk ticket. Include in your ticket your institutional affiliation and a brief statement confirming that you will use MATLAB only for non-commercial, academic purposes. If you are affiliated with the University of Texas, include your academic department in your help desk ticket.

If you have your own network licenses for toolboxes that are not available through the University of Texas, we can help you configure these licenses on TACC systems. Again, submit a help desk ticket for assistance.

Interactive Mode

MATLAB is normally launched with the MATLAB Desktop UI and used in interactive mode. Create a VNC session following the directions in the Remote Desktop Access section.

MATLAB is managed under the modules system on the TACC resources. Before you launch MATLAB load the MATLAB module with the following command:

login1$ module load matlab

You can always get the MATLAB help information by typing the following module help command.

login1$ module help matlab

The following figure shows how MATLAB is launched inside the VNC session.

Figure 1. MATLAB launched in a VNC session

Batch Mode

You can also submit your MATLAB job to the batch nodes (compute nodes) on the TACC resources, e.g. Frontera, Stampede2, or Lonestar6. To do so, first make sure that the MATLAB module has been loaded, and then launch matlab with the -nodesktop -nodisplay -nosplash option as shown in the sample Stampede2 job script below.

Example 1. Sample MATLAB job script to run on Stampede2

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -J matlabjob              # job name
#SBATCH -e matlabjob.%j.err       # error file name 
#SBATCH -o matlabjob.%j.out       # output file name 
#SBATCH -N 1                      # request 1 node
#SBATCH -n 16                     # request all 16 cores 
#SBATCH -t 01:00:00               # designate max run time 
#SBATCH -A myproject              # charge job to myproject 
#SBATCH -p skx-normal             # designate queue 

module load matlab
matlab -nodesktop -nodisplay -nosplash < mymatlabprog.m

Then submit the job to the scheduler in the standard way. See the Running Jobs section in the respective user guides

Resource	Submit a batch job
Frontera	login1$ sbatch myjobscript
Stampede2	login1$ sbatch myjobscript
Lonestar6	login1$ sbatch myjobscript

Parallel MATLAB

The parallel computing toolbox is available on the TACC resources as well. Our MathWorks Total Academic Headcount (TAH) license for the UT-Austin campus does not include MATLAB Distributed Computing Server. Therefore, multi-node parallel operations are not supported.

The following two examples demonstrate parallel operations using the parfor and matlabpool functions. Here are the basic examples.

Example 2. MATLAB parfor

Mat=zeros(100,1);
parfor i = 1:100
    Mat(i) = i*i;
end

Example 3. MATLAB matlabpool

if (matlabpool('size') ) == 0 
    matlabpool(12);
else
    matlabpool close;
    matlabpool(12);
end

Consult the MATLAB Parallel Toolbox documentation for detailed descriptions and advanced features.

MATLAB Toolboxes

MATLAB, Simulink, and a lot of MATLAB toolboxes are available on the TACC resources. Listed below is the complete set of Toolboxes on the TACC resources:

Aerospace Blockset Aerospace Toolbox Bioinformatics Toolbox Communications System Toolbox Computer Vision System Toolbox Control System Toolbox Curve Fitting Toolbox DSP System Toolbox Database Toolbox Econometrics Toolbox Embedded Coder Financial Instruments Toolbox Financial Toolbox Fixed-Point Designer

Fuzzy Logic Toolbox Global Optimization Toolbox HDL Verifier Image Acquisition Toolbox Image Processing Toolbox Instrument Control Toolbox LTE System Toolbox MATLAB Coder MATLAB Compiler MATLAB Compiler SDK MATLAB Report Generator Mapping Toolbox Model Predictive Control Toolbox Neural Network Toolbox

Optimization Toolbox Parallel Computing Toolbox Partial Differential Equation Toolbox Phased Array System Toolbox RF Blockset RF Toolbox Robust Control Toolbox Signal Processing Toolbox SimBiology Simscape Simscape Driveline Simscape Electronics Simscape Fluids Simscape Multibody

Simscape Power Systems Simulink Simulink Check Simulink Coder Simulink Control Design Simulink Coverage Simulink Design Optimization Simulink Requirements Stateflow Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox Symbolic Math Toolbox System Identification Toolbox WLAN System Toolbox Wavelet Toolbox

To see a complete list of MATLAB, Simulink, and MATLAB Toolboxes and their version information, type the ver command at the MATLAB prompt

>> ver

Mathworks References

Mathworks has an excellent collection of documentation, videos and webinars.

• Parallel Computing Overview
• Parallel Computing Coding Examples
• Parallel Computing Documentation
• Parallel Computing Tutorials
• Parallel Computing Videos
• Parallel Computing Webinars

Help

MATLAB is a commercial product of MathWorks. Please solicit help from Mathworks regarding MATLAB code. If you need any further assistance related to access issues or running issues, request help via the TACC User Portal.