News and New Products

The Mathworks adds support for parallel apps, multithreaded computations, 64-bit platforms

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- EDN, 11/12/2007

Aimed at helping engineers and scientists model increasingly complex systems in less time by allowing development of parallel applications independently of the resources that are available for execution, Natick, Mass.-based technical computing and model-based design software provider The MathWorks today announced four enhancements in its MATLAB and Distributed Computing Toolbox products meant to allow increased performance and large data set handling.

MATLAB now supports for multithreaded computation for multicore systems and 64-bit Solaris platforms. Distributing Computing Toolbox now offers capabilities to develop applications that interleave parallel and serial code and interactively prototyping parallel algorithms on a desktop computer by running four local MATLAB sessions.

With MATLAB and Distributed Computing Toolbox, engineers can prototype parallel applications on multicore desktop computers using up to four processors and four MATLAB sessions. For more computing power, these applications can scale to a computer cluster without code change by utilizing the MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine. The applications can also include serial code that is executed in the desktop machine, the company noted.

Using the multithreading feature, MATLAB applications using element-wise and linear algebra functions can leverage multicore machines by running multiple threads simultaneously for improved performance. The 64-bit Solaris support allows engineers using MATLAB to leverage the benefits of 64-bit computing to develop applications involving large data sets and computationally intensive tasks.

MATLAB 7.5 is available now.

Also today, The MathWorks announced a new version of its test management and analysis software for system verification and validation, SystemTest.

With the software, engineers can automatically distribute independent tests or simulation runs of Simulink models to multiple processors, without manual coding, as SystemTest 2 works with the company’s Distributed Computing Toolbox software. The enhancements in SystemTest 2 are meant to reduce the time needed for testing, leading to faster production of system designs.

SystemTest 2 is also available now.