Connecting laptop(s)/desktop(s) to form a MATLAB computing cluster?

I have experience ru开发者_StackOverflow中文版nning parallel jobs on a remote cluster, and parallel (parfor) jobs on a single local machine, but never tried making a cluster of my own. I have access couple of laptops/desktops/servers (root access on all except one server), and was wondering if I could connect them all (or some) to form a local cluster (will have about 30 cores total).

Once you move beyond working with one machine, you move license types from a parallel computing toolbox to a Distributed Computing Server license. The licenses are available in clusters from 8 workers and up. List price on a 8 worker cluster is $6K, 32 workers are $21K. You can get more information on the Mathworks product page. Also note that submitting jobs to the workers requires the Parallel Computing Toolbox.

Once you have the worker licenses the only supported way to distribute jobs to the workers is through a scheduler. The server licenses come with a basic Mathworks scheduler that does have some limitations, but is ideal for single users or small groups. Beyond that you would need to go with one of the higher end schedulers such as LSF. A full list of supported schedulers is on the product page. Moving from a PCT setup on a single machine to a distributed setup can be fairly involved.

Are you prepared to pay the license cost for this? You can use local clusters (up to 8) using 1 copy of the parallel computing toolbox license. But to use distributed clusters, you need a distributed computing toolbox for each "node" (processor core) on the cluster. I'm not familiar with how to set this up. I know that I have access to a few of these clusters, and I also use local clusters extensively. We opted to not create our own distributed cluster for this reason. We also have data that shows that distributed clusters were slow for our particular tasks (a lot of file io was happening in our case).

I know this doesn't answer your question, just a few things to think about.