Parallel Computing Toolbox 4.0

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server and Windows HPC Server 2008

 

Integration with Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server

Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server directly support Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) and Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 (HPCS). As a result, the products can be used in most computing environments managed by these schedulers without any extra setup. It is possible to customize the integration of MathWorks products for your specific requirements by modifying the integration scripts, which use the underlying generic scheduler interface API available with the products.

With these Microsoft products, the toolbox and the server use Microsoft's implementation of MPI (MS-MPI) and not the default MPI distribution that is shipped with the toolbox and the engine. Callbacks and dynamic addition of tasks to running jobs are not supported for either of these Microsoft products.

Notes for Windows HPC Server 2008 integration

MathWorks parallel computing products use the Windows CCS API (API version 1) to integrate with Windows HPC Server 2008. As a result, some of the advanced capabilities, such as using MATLAB Distributed Computing Server with SOA capabilities in Windows HPCS, are not available. You can use the MathWorks products in both interactive and non-interactive (batch) modes. However, the functionality will be limited to that available in Windows CCS. The MathWorks will consider supporting the advanced capabilities that are available in Windows HPCS in a future release of its parallel computing products.

Features

Microsoft Windows CCS and Windows HPCS offer several features, including:

• Ability to manage multiple applications that include MathWorks parallel computing products 
• Simplified cluster deployment and management with monitoring tools, setup wizards for networking, installation services, and cluster security
• Integration with existing Windows infrastructure, letting you use existing tools for system, workload, user, and security management
• Integrated MPI layer based on MPI-2 standard. The toolbox and the server use Microsoft's implementation of MPI (MS-MPI) for both Windows CCS and Windows HPCS,
• Integration with Visual Studio, including support for parallel applications with debugging capabilities

Information Resources

The following resources provide information on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Windows HPC Server 2008:

• Documentation illustrates how you can use Windows CCS to submit jobs for execution on your Windows cluster in Programming Distributed Jobs and Programming Parallel Jobs. The same set of steps applies to Windows HPCS.
• Product Web site for Microsoft HPC Server provides detailed information about the Microsoft products.