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doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2004.03.018 
Copyright © 2004 Published by Elsevier Inc.
Short communication
MatlabMPI*1
Received 2 January 2003;
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Abstract
In many projects the true costs of high performance computing are currently dominated by software. Addressing these costs may require shifting to higher level languages such as Matlab. MatlabMPI is a Matlab implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard and allows any Matlab program to exploit multiple processors. MatlabMPI currently implements the basic six functions that are the core of the MPI point-to-point communications standard. The key technical innovation of MatlabMPI is that it implements the widely used MPI “look and feel” on top of standard Matlab file I/O, resulting in an extremely compact (
350 lines of code) and “pure” implementation which runs anywhere Matlab runs, and on any heterogeneous combination of computers. The performance has been tested on both shared and distributed memory parallel computers (e.g. Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Linux, MacOSX and Windows). MatlabMPI can match the bandwidth of C based MPI at large message sizes. A test image filtering application using MatlabMPI achieved a speedup of 300 using 304 CPUs and 15% of the theoretical peak (450 Gigaflops) on an IBM SP2 at the Maui High Performance Computing Center. In addition, this entire parallel benchmark application was implemented in 70 software-lines-of-code, illustrating the high productivity of this approach. MatlabMPI is available for download on the web (www.ll.mit.edu/MatlabMPI).
Author Keywords: Message passing; High level languages; Parallel Matlab
