I’ve simply returned from the MathWorks firm assembly celebrating our fortieth Anniversary. In one of many displays, Jos Martin described how Parallel MATLAB was launched virtually twenty years in the past. Listed here are a couple of slides from Jos’s speak.
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Why There Wasn’t Any Parallel MATLAB
In MATLAB Information and Notes for spring 1995, I wrote a one-page Cleve’s Nook titled “Why there’s no parallel MATLAB.” There have been three causes.
- Reminiscence mannequin. MATLAB would generate a matrix on a bunch machine, break up it into roughly equally sized submatrices, and distribute every submatrix to a node. Nevertheless it took far longer to distribute the info then it did to do the computation. Any matrix that may match into reminiscence on the host was too small to make efficient use of the parallel laptop itself.
- Granularity. The quantity of labor concerned in a single matrix computation is simply too little to be successfully parallelized.
- Enterprise state of affairs. There are too few potential prospects right now (1995) to undertake elementary adjustments in MATLAB’s structure.
This one-page observe turned out to be one in all my most generally cited publications.
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Twenty-seven Parallel MATLABs
A 2001 survey by Ron Choy at MIT discovered 27 completely different initiatives that had been growing some option to run MATLAB in parallel. All of them concerned a MATLAB-based host program calling a set library of parallel features, written in another language, on the employees. Not one of the techniques had been able to operating arbitrary MATLAB applications in parallel. None of them had been MathWorks merchandise.
Distributed Computing Toolbox
MathWorks launched the MATLAB Distributed Computing Toolbox in November 2004. We improvised this demo setup at our first Supercomputing Convention, SC2004 in Pittsburg,
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Supercomputing Convention
A yr later, SC2005 was in Seattle and our sales space featured 4 employee machines on a wire shelving unit bought at an area House Depot.
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Invoice Gates
Since Seattle was his residence city, Invoice Gates gave the keynote speak at SC2005. He introduced that Microsoft was going into Excessive Efficiency Computing and used the MathWorks Distributed Computing Toolbox in his demonstration.
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Now There’s a Parallel MATLAB
So, a bit greater than ten years after the primary Cleve’s Nook about parallel computing, a second Cleve’s Nook in Information and Notes was capable of reverse the state of affairs.
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Printed with MATLAB® R2023a
