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The MathWorks today announced the availability of the Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 , which provides engineers and scientists with a high-productivity programming tool to simplify the development of distributed computing applications.  The Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 now offers support for third-party schedulers, and new interprocess communication capabilities for distributing and executing parallel algorithms in a cluster of computers using MATLAB ®.  With these new features, the upgraded Distributed Computing Toolbox allows domain experts to tackle formidable computing challenges and easily develop distributed computing applications on their own.

The Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 supports third-party schedulers, such as LSF from Platform Computing. As a result, users can use the generic API provided with the toolbox and integrate MathWorks distributed computing tools into their existing distributed computing environments.  This capability enables users to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the scheduler, such as support for batch jobs, in addition to the interactive workflows supported in version 1 by The MathWorks job manager in the MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine (available separately).

A major enhancement in the Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 is interprocess communication, enabling execution of parallel applications that are divided into interdependent tasks.  The new version includes communication functions based on Message Passing Interface (MPI), the industry-wide protocol for communication in a parallel program.  Additionally, because Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 runs on all hardware on which MATLAB runs, users can redeploy their parallel applications on new hardware or operating systems without having to retool the entire application.  

"The MathWorks has added significant new capabilities to the Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 and the Distributed Computing Engine 2 that have allowed us to integrate the products with our existing scheduler, and the results have been great,” said Siddharth Samsi, of Ohio Supercomputing Center.    “These tools are changing the way engineers and scientists use MATLAB in the high-performance computing field, and will allow us to perform tasks that were not possible before.  We are very excited about this upgrade.”

“Today’s engineers and scientists want a tool that makes it convenient to develop and run distributed applications using MATLAB and other software on their desktop,” said Lisa Kempler, director of MATLAB product marketing, The MathWorks.  “The Distributed Computing Toolbox 2 makes personal supercomputing power easily available to the hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists who already use MATLAB, and at the same time offers a convenient high-level technical language for supercomputing specialists.”