[Beowulf] Re: SGE + policy

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Fri, 28 May 2004 at 12:07pm, Orion Poplawski wrote

> Robert G. Brown wrote:
> > 
> > This probably doesn't worry them, because in one sense anybody who uses
> > matlab for doing "serious" computations probably needs therapy, and
> > clusters are often build for doing serious computations.  However, this
> > particular cluster is being built as much to support many students doing
> > less serious computations as it is to support work that really should
> > probably be done in c.* or f.*, and in a lot of cases the real expense
> > is teaching people with little or no real programming experience how to
> > convert from a garbage-tolerant interactive environment to a compiled
> > language.
> > 
> 
> You can buy a matlab compiler from mathworks.  Perhaps this would work 
> better.  There is also some kind of run-time server as well that turns 
> the code into standalone programs.  I've never used either, but we may 
> soon.  Experiences with either would be appreciated.

I've only played a little bit with the matlab compiler, but my experiences 
indicated (and some googling of comp.soft-sys.matlab seemed to back this 
up) that the compiled, matlab generated C code is no faster than the 
"source" .m files.  It *does*, of course, alleviate the issue of 
licensing (err, at least I think it does -- it's been a while), but it 
sure doesn't buy you any speed.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University