Access

The college has a site license for Matlab.

Running Matlab Interactively

There are a number of versions of Matlab installed on the TCHPC clusters.

To run Matlab interactively on the TCHPC clusters, you must:

• log in via SSH
• obtain an interactive allocation on the cluster, using your project code
• load the modules:
  • To load the main version of matlab, currently version R2011b, type module load apps matlab/R2011b
  • To load the version of matlab available to TCIN users, type module load tcin matlab
• and then run it from the command-line: matlab

Running Matlab through the Batch System

To submit a batch Matlab job on the TCHPC clusters, you must:

• create a text file containing the commands you wish to run, e.g. "test.m" (see below for an example)
• the .m matlab file must include exit as the last line, to make sure that matlab exits correctly
• create a SLURM batch submission script (see below for an example)
• submit it to the queue
• when the job has finished, check the output

Sample Matlab File

This file (called "test.m") simply creates a matrix and prints it out.

% comments in the matlab file start with a percent sign

% create the matrix
A = rand(4,4);

% print it out
A

% NB: include this line at the end
exit;

Sample SLURM Script

This loads the relevant modules, calls Matlab with the given instructions, and redirects the output to a file called "output.txt".

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -n 1		# number of cores
#SBATCH -p compute	# compute queue
#SBATCH -t 00:10:00	# time (ddd-hh:mm:ss)
#SBATCH -J matlab       # job name
#SBATCH -U HPC_11_00555	# the account string

# load up the correct modules

. /etc/profile.d/modules.sh
module load tcin matlab

# call matlab non-interactively

matlab -nodisplay < test.m > output.txt

Alternatives to Matlab

There are a few free and open-source alternatives to Matlab such as Scilab and Octave. These programs are available on a selection of the machines that TCHPC maintain.