BATCH

Distributed Matlab job execution library.

• High-level Matlab wrapper over computing grid infrastracture.
• Matlab parallel processing toolbox not required.

Currently following job schedulers are supported.

• Sun Grid Engine (qsub)
• Platform LSF (bsub)
• Matlab Parallel Computing Toolbox supporting parpool
• Fake scheduler for debugging

Example

The following code shows an example of distributing 100 data points to 5 distributed jobs. Note the function handle @(x)x+1 takes a vector with 100 / 5 = 20 elements at each distributed job.

addpath('/path/to/matlab-batch');
scheduler = createJobScheduler('ShardSize', 5);
input_data = 1:100;
output_data = scheduler.execute(@(x)x+1, input_data);
disp(output_data);

The function can be a char or a function handle. The function must take a single input argument of split data and return a corresponding output for the input data. You may pass any array to the scheduler, as long as the input and the output contains the same number of elements. To process a complex input, use a struct array instead of a numeric array.

function exampleBatchUsage()
%EXAMPLEBATCHUSAGE Another usage example.
  scheduler = SGEJobScheduler('ShardSize', 5, ...
                              'ExtraOptions', '-l hostname=host1');
  input_data = struct('index', num2cell(1:100));
  additional_input = 'some flag';
  output_data = scheduler.execute(@processBatch, ...
                                  input_data, ...
                                  additional_input);
end

function data = processBatch(data, varargin)
%PROCESSBATCH This function takes a split batch of input data.
  [data.result] = deal([]);
  for i = 1:numel(data)
    data(i).result = complicatedFunction(data(i), varargin{:});
  end
end

Tips

• Be careful about the data size. If you assign large data to each element of the output, you will run out of memory. To generate large data in the output, save them in an external file and return an array of file names.