MATLAB parallel computing setup

I have a quad core computer; and I use the parallel computing toolbox. I set different number for the "worker" number in the parallel computing setting, for example 2,4,8.............. However, no matter what I set, the AVERAGE cpu usage by MATLAB is exactly 25% of total CPU usage; and None of the cores run at 100% (All are around 10%-30%). I am using MATLAB to 开发者_如何学Pythonrun optimization problem, so I really want my quad core computer using all its power to do the computing. Please help

Setting a number of workers (up to 4 on a quad-core) is not enough. You also need to use a command like parfor to signal to Matlab what part of the calculation should be distributed among the workers.

I am curious about what kind of optimization you're running. Normally, optimization problems are very difficult to parallelize, since the result of every iteration depends on the previous one. However, if you want to e.g. try and fit multiple models to the data, or if you have to fit multiple data sets, then you can easily run these in parallel as opposed to sequentially.

Note that having many cores may not be sufficient in terms of resources - if performing the optimization on one worker uses k GB of RAM, performing it on n workers requires at least n*k GB of RAM.