Message Passing under MATLAB
Javier Fernández Baldomero · 2000
This work presents an interface to the widely used PVM and MPI message passing systems, by means of which MATLAB users can prototype applications in the usual highlevel programming environment, while retaining the ability to make PVM and MPI calls. The rapid spread of clusters of computers in academic and industrial facilities, making parallel computing available to any user at a fraction of its former price, explains the interest and timeliness of such an interface. Two PVM/MPI functions are studied, showing to some extent the implementation details of the interface. Performance measures on code written in C as well as in MATLAB show that the overhead introduced by the interface is very small, and certainly acceptable for the coarse-grained simulations typically run under MATLAB. Two parallelization approaches are then applied to a case study on wavelet analysis, in order to show typically achievable speedups. The user's knowledge of the application can be used to choose the coarsest grained approach, which in turn leads to performance gains that make the interface overhead and the choice between PVM and MPI irrelevant. 1