Product Requirements & Platform Availability for MATLAB Parallel Server

• Requires access to a client session of MATLAB and Parallel Computing Toolbox for job submission. Note that only the cluster computers need to have MATLAB Parallel Server installed.

System Requirements

Cluster Computers Running MATLAB Workers (All Schedulers)

• A shared file system between user desktops and cluster is strongly recommended. Availability of a shared file system is assumed by default for all the built-in configurations. An API is available to extend these configurations for environments with nonshared file systems.
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• Minimum of 2 GB RAM per MATLAB worker is recommended. If you are using Simulink, 4GB RAM per worker is recommended.
• Approximately 20GB of disk space to accommodate a typical complete installation of MATLAB Parallel Server.
• Minimum of 5 GB of disk space is recommended to accommodate temporary data directories.
• Several TCP ports are required by MATLAB workers for various worker services and for inter-worker communication.
• For interactive parallel computations, MATLAB workers running on cluster computers must be able to connect to MATLAB session running on user desktop via TCP. This is not required for running applications in batch.
• Homogeneous cluster configurations are recommended. Parallel processing constructs that work on the infrastructure enabled by parpool—parfor, parfeval spmd, distributed arrays, and message passing functions—cannot be used on a heterogeneous cluster configuration. The underlying MPI infrastructure requires that all cluster computers have matching word sizes and processor endianness. A limited set of functions in Parallel Computing Toolbox can work in heterogeneous cluster configurations.
• If you are using Linux or Macintosh, and will create large parallel pools of workers, it is recommended that you adjust your operating system limits. For more information, see Recommended System Limits for Macintosh and Linux.
• Maximum of 1 MATLAB worker per physical CPU core is recommended.

Clusters Using Third-Party Schedulers

• See the list of supported schedulers. Consult your scheduler documentation for details. Most schedulers require client utilities to be installed on the computer that submits jobs to the cluster.

Clusters Using MathWorks Job Manager as the Scheduler

Connecting a Desktop Computer (Client Machine) to MATLAB Parallel Server Running on the Amazon EC2 Cloud

• The client machine must be able to make outgoing connections to any DNS name in the domain mathworks.com and in amazonaws.com on port 443 (https) or have a properly configured SSL capable proxy server that can contact those domains.
• The client machine must be able to make outgoing connections to the cluster machines in the amazonaws.com domain directly on a set of specific ports. These ports differ by MATLAB release and by whether the cluster was started with Cloud Center or from a custom installation. The required ports are summarized in a table below. In the table, N is the maximum number of workers on a single node.
• Note that ability to "make outgoing connections" means that the client machine must be able to instantiate a socket to the cluster, which at a TCP level means that the initial SYN packet for the TCP/IP communication comes from the client. Most NAT and general firewalls allow this type of communication, but if you have more stringent rules, you may need to enable such outgoing communication.

• The client and the cluster running in the cloud should be connected via "always connected" TCP communications. Should a network device between the client computer and the cluster reset the TCP stream, then any open interactive parpool sessions will be shut down.
• Access to Cloud Center clusters is restricted to specified external IP addresses. These addresses can be configured manually in Cloud Center or automatically if the “Auto-Manage Cluster Access” feature has been enabled on the cluster. In most local networks, policies in place mean that the public Internet address of the computer, as seen from other places on the Internet, differs from the local address. Contact your administrator or visit www.whatismyipaddress.com to determine the public Internet address of your computer.