MATLAB

I heard that a couple of people in the lab were hoping to use MATLAB for various things. Following a discussion with IT I've been shown how to access MATLAB from any computer with internet access, including workstations in the CIN and computers outside the local network.

I've written short instructions below on how to do this for a CIN computer, but if you want to run this from home drop me a message. It is not necessary to install MATLAB on your computer for this to work, though you will need to install Putty and Xming. Setup time for this should be around 10 to 20 minutes.

Note that programs executed on MATLAB this way should be fast, as they are running on the CIN's high performance computing cluster. You may experience a slight delay with MATLAB responding to your typing, which will depend on the speed of your connection (fast in the CIN, slower remotely). It is possible to set Xming and Putty up on a memory stick to make this method portable - let me know if you want to do this.

Installation Instructions

Putty: chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html Xming: straightrunning.com/xmingnotes/

Install putty. Install Xming. Run Xming. Ignore the various options (set them as you want) and click through until it minimises to your toolbar.

Run Putty. Set the host name to 172.25.250.112, port 60222. Save the session with a suitable name. Click the + next to ssh on the left hand toolbar, click X11, tick 'Enable X11 forwarding', set the X display location to 'localhost:0'. Return to the sessions page and save the session.

Select your session and click Open. This will open a terminal window, which will request your CIN username (initial and surname, e.g. 'lrogerson') and password. Enter these and it should return a message saying you are at the CIN Cluster headnode with a picture of a startled mouse.

Enter either 'ssh cn30 -X' or 'ssh cn31 -X' (would prefer if you used cn30, but it doesn't matter very much). This will take you to the Euler lab nodes, which are environments that people in the lab can use for running programs on the supercomputers.

Here, enter '/usr/local/MATLAB/R2015a/bin/matlab', which will run an instance of the latest edition of MATLAB. If X11 & Xming are set up correctly, after a few seconds a MATLAB window will open on your computer, which works like a typical local installation. This reads files and scripts from your personal folder on the CIN storage.