Parallel Programming with MatlabMPI

TL;DR

MatlabMPI provides a simple, portable implementation of MPI in Matlab, enabling parallel processing with high performance and ease of use for Matlab programs on various hardware architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a compact, pure Matlab implementation of MPI using file I/O, making parallel programming accessible within Matlab without external dependencies.

Findings

MatlabMPI matches C MPI bandwidth at large message sizes.

Achieved a speedup of approximately 70 in image filtering application.

Runs efficiently on shared and distributed memory systems.

Abstract

MatlabMPI is a Matlab implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard and allows any Matlab program to exploit multiple processors. MatlabMPI currently implements the basic six functions that are the core of the MPI point-to-point communications standard. The key technical innovation of MatlabMPI is that it implements the widely used MPI ``look and feel'' on top of standard Matlab file I/O, resulting in an extremely compact (~100 lines) and ``pure'' implementation which runs anywhere Matlab runs. The performance has been tested on both shared and distributed memory parallel computers. MatlabMPI can match the bandwidth of C based MPI at large message sizes. A test image filtering application using MatlabMPI achieved a speedup of ~70 on a parallel computer.