How to determine whether Matlab's Distributed Computing Server is available?

The company I work for has a decent sized HPC facility. I know we have a few licences for the "Parallel Computing Toolbox" (for running on individual machines), but I do not see anything specifically about the "Distributed Computing Server" when I type "ver" at Matlab's command line. Should I be able to see whether the "Distributed Computing Server" is available through the "ver" command? If not, how would one go about determining this information?

[Dr. Seis]

Looking through some previous questions, someone talked about a "Distributed Computing Toolbox"... Is this close to what should show up when I type the "ver" command (to verify I have or can use this capability)?

Answer 1

[Shashank Prasanna]

Elige, MATLAB Distributed Computing Server (MDCS) would be installed on the HPC server and you not on your local machine. The only thing you need on your local machine is Parallel Computing Toolbox (PCT) in order to be able to ship of jobs to the cluster.

If you are using a recent release of MATLAB click on Parallel on the toolstrip and click on Discover Clusters. PCT will then scan the network to see if there are clusters running MDCS which you can use. HTH.

[Dr. Seis]

Thanks, Shashank. The latest version of Matlab available to us is R2011a (not sure if this is recent enough), but "Discover Clusters" is not available under the "Parallel" menu.

I also finally heard back from our IT about what licences/product we have from MathWorks... and MDCS is not one of them.

[Jason Ross]

Just to clarify about Discover Clusters ... it will find MJS (MATLAB Job Server) and Microsoft HPC Server. It won't find MDCS that has been integrated with LSF, PBS Pro or Torque. For those types of profiles, you need to get the information from the people who administer the cluster.

It's also entirely possible that for some networking setups and configurations, Discover Clusters won't find anything -- so asking may also be a good second step if you can't find something.

[Dr. Seis]

Hi Jason.... so just for my own future knowledge: Should there be some toolbox license that would show up when I enter the "ver" command? I now know that we do not have it, but should there have been a way for me to verify this on my own?

[Shashank Prasanna]

Elige, since MDCS isn't running on your local machine, nothing will show up on your local installation. If you have PCT installed, you will be able to use a cluster that has MDCS installed. As Jason mentioned you will need to contact the administrator for the connection details.

[Jason Ross]

The relevant toolbox license is Parallel Computing Toolbox. You wouldn't see MDCS unless it was also part of the local installation. Your site adminstrators would have instructions/policies/guidelines/best practices for submitting jobs to a cluster, which in my experience can vary substantially from site to site.