MATLAB® Distributed Computing Server™ 3.3

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server

Integration with Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server

Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server directly support Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Using this scheduler, you can execute both distributed jobs, which do not involve any intertask communication, and parallel jobs, which involve intertask communication.

With Microsoft Windows CCS, the toolbox and the engine use Microsoft's implementation of MPI (MS-MPI) and not the default MPI distribution that is shipped with the toolbox and the engine. Callbacks and dynamic addition of tasks to running jobs are not supported for CCS.

With the MathWorks job manager, the MATLAB Distributed Computing Server workers on the cluster run as a service and remain running at all times. With CCS, the workers run as an application and are started for the evaluation of tasks, and they are stopped when their tasks are complete. As a result, you incur an extra overhead of worker start-up and stop time. Create your tasks taking this overhead into account; for small tasks, this may represent a significant percentage of the overall execution time.  

Features

CCS offers several features, including:

• Ability to manage multiple applications that include MathWorks distributed computing tools 
• Simplified cluster deployment and management with monitoring tools, setup wizards for networking, installation services, and cluster security
• Integration with existing Windows infrastructure, allowing you to use existing tools for system, workload, user, and security management
• Integrated MPI layer based on MPI-2 standard. With Microsoft Windows CCS, the toolbox and the engine use Microsoft's implementation of MPI (MS-MPI)
• Visual Studio 2005, including support for parallel applications with debugging capabilities

Information Resources

The following resources provide information on Windows CCS:

• Documentation illustrates how you can use Windows CCS to submit jobs for execution on your Windows cluster in Programming Distributed Jobs and Programming Parallel Jobs.
• Product Web site for Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server provides detailed information about the scheduler.