Running Matlab

Running Matlab on the clusters

After logging into the clusters, users can check and load Matlab versions currently available by running the following code. For more information on modules, check here.

# check what matlab modules are available for use
module avail

# run one of the following to load matlab module into your session
module load matlab/<version>    # replace <version> with the one you want to use

Running Matlab interactively

warning

Do not run computationally intensive Matlab session on login node.

Users can start an interactive command line session of Matlab using

matlab -nodisplay -nosplash

To exit an interactive Matlab session, enter quit or its equivalent exit, which will take users back to bash command prompt. (Check terminate Matlab session)

Running interacive session on a compute node

User can also request compute node resource for running interactive jobs, the example command below is asking for 1 core from 1 node using test partition for 15 mins.

salloc --partition=test --nodes=1 --ntasks-per-node=1 --time=00:15:00

After running the above command, SLURM will allocate a suitable resource for you with a JobID. For example:

salloc: Granted job allocation 2423487
salloc: Waiting for resource configuration
salloc: Nodes mrcd114 are ready for job

Then user can use the following command to go to the allocated node with the assigned JobID.

srun --jobid=2423487 --pty /bin/bash

After log into the node, user can do the same command mentioned above to run Matlab interactively

module load matlab/<version>
matlab -nodisplay -nosplash

To exit the allocated node, type exit , and then it lead you back to the login node, type exit again, will exit the job.

Running Matlab jobs

Users can also run their Matlab script as a job on MERCED. Here is the SLURM submission file template for running various Matlab commands as jobs.

Example Job Script for running Matlab

#! /bin/bash

#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=10    # users could ask a max of 20 or 24 cores per node depending on MERCED hardware configuration
#SBATCH -p test 
#SBATCH -M merced #This line is needed if running on Merced Cluster
#SBATCH --mem=0  #This will use entire node memory
#SBATCH --time=0-00:15:00     # 15 minutes
#SBATCH --output=regular.stdout
#SBATCH --job-name=test
#SBATCH --export=ALL


module load matlab/r2021b  # OR module load matlab/matlab_2018b
# example 1
matlab -nodisplay -nodesktop -nosplash -r "ver; exit;"

# example 2
matlab -nodisplay -nodesktop -nosplash -r "license('test', 'optimization_toolbox'); exit;"

# example 3
matlab -nodisplay -nodesktop -nosplash -logfile /path/to/test_matlab.log < test_matlab.m

Users can supply -h parameter to matlab to review all input parameters to matlab command i.e. matlab -h.