HPC/Applications/matlab

Recommendation

Use GNU Octave instead of MATLAB.

Introduction

MATLAB on Carbon is available but subject to extremely limiting license terms.

Licensing

Most of the information conveyed here concerns licensing, a thoroughly unloved necessity of high-profile commercial software. Running MATLAB is restricted to:

• Argonne employees (including consultants and students),
• on node clogin5 only,
• by one user at a time,
• not remotely.

Toolboxes

We have the following toolboxes installed:

• Curve_Fitting_Toolbox
• Image_Toolbox
• Optimization_Toolbox
• Distrib_Computing_Toolbox
• Statistics_Toolbox

Running MATLAB

• To get started, load the "matlab" module as described at HPC/Module Setup.
• Then choose how to run the application:

GUI

matlab

Command line

For basic calculations, you could save some startup time by simply using the text interface.

matlab -nojvm

Troubleshooting

Access

You must be a member of the "employees" group on Carbon to run MATLAB. If you are not, you could load the "matlab" module but it will not enable anything.

• To inspect your current group membership, run:

groups

The word "employees" must show. Since the group has been added only this week (Feb. 5, 2013), you may need to log out and back in to pick up the group membership.

Running on a host that is not licensed

License checkout failed.
License Manager Error -9
The hostid of your computer ("001122334455 001122334466") does not match the hostid of the license file (001122334400).

Solution: log in to clogin5 and retry. If you use the Mega SSH gateway, review the updated instructions for Linux/Mac/Cygwin or PuTTY on Windows on how to configure and use port forwarding to reach a specific login node.

License in use

License checkout failed.
License Manager Error -9
This error may occur when:
-The hostid of this computer does not match the hostid in the license file.
-A Designated Computer installation is in use by another user.
If no other user is currently running MATLAB, you may need to activate.

Solution: Wait a half hour or so and retry. You can identify the user currently running matlab using the "ps aux | grep matlab" command. Be considerate in negotiating access with that user.