MATLAB*G: A Grid-Based Parallel MATLAB

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of MATLAB*G, a parallel MATLAB on the ALiCE Grid. ALiCE (Adaptive and scaLable internet-based Computing Engine), developed at NUS, is a lightweight grid-computing middleware. Grid applications in ALiCE are written in Java and use the distributed shared memory programming model. Utilizing existing MATLAB functions, MATLAB*G provides distributed matrix computation to the user through a set of simple commands. Currently two forms of parallelism for distributed matrix computation are implemented: task parallelism and job parallelism. Experiments are carried out to investigate the performance of MATLAB*G on each type of parallelism. Results indicate that for large matrix sizes MATLAB*G can be a faster alternative to sequential MATLAB.