MATLAB Tutorial

Find the files in this tutorial on our GitHub!

MATLAB is a high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming. Using MATLAB, you can analyze data, develop algorithms, and create models and applications. The program can be used with the GUI or in batch mode. Documentation for MATLAB can be found on its official website.

Currently, MATLAB versions R2017b, R2019a, R2019b are available on the cluster.

Basics

To use MATLAB through the command line, first load the MATLAB module, then use a command similar to below:

matlab -r myscript

where myscript is the MATLAB script myscript.m

To run MATLAB interactively (using the GUI), you must first enable transparent forwarding when connecting to the server using the -X option to the ssh command. Once logged in, start the MATLAB GUI by simply typing matlab into the command line.

Running MATLAB through a job script

1. Create a MATLAB script. The linked repository provides a simple script, matlabtest.m, which generates a matrix, randomly populates it, finds the inverse, and then computes the product of the two matrices.

matlabtest.m


% sets the size of the matrix to 4 x 4
n = 4;
% randomly populates the matrix with values
A = rand(n);
% print the result
A
% takes the inverse of the matrix
V = inv(A);
% print the result
V

% multiply by the original matrix to get the identity matrix
I = V*A

2. Prepare the submission script, which is the script that is submitted to the Slurm scheduler as a job in order to run the MATLAB script. The linked repository provides the script job.sh as an example.

job.sh


#!/bin/bash

#SBATCH --job-name=matlab_test
#SBATCH -o matlab_out%j.out
#SBATCH -e matlab_err%j.err
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1

echo -e '\n submitted Matlab job'
echo 'hostname'
hostname

#loads the matlab module
module load matlab

#runs the matlabtest.m file using matlab, forwards results to results.txt
matlab -r matlabtest > results.txt

3. Submit the job using sbatch job.sh

4. Examine the results by opening the created output file.