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

MATLAB-1

Important

Do NOT launch MATLAB on the login nodes. This may fail and, more importantly, it will prevent other users from doing their work, as your execution will take up too many cycles on the shared login node. Using MATLAB on the login nodes is considered system abuse, and will be treated as such. See TACC usage policies.

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.

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.