Very few engineers and scientists would consider themselves HPC experts. Most are just learning what it means to have multiple cores in their computer or access to GPUs that can do things other than graphics processing. These same people also have day jobs that require them to get their work done using the tools they have available to them. This is where MATLAB and other solutions come in.

In order to successfully leverage these tools, engineers and scientists need an easy on ramp. They don’t want to be required to have to know MPI just to be able to leverage the hardware available to them. They also don’t want to change their existing code base and they need to think about things like sharing their code with others who may not have the same hardware. MathWorks has been working to provide multiple levels of abstraction with our parallel computing capabilities so that users can leverage parallelism at the level that is appropriate for them; ranging from none to very few coding changes to low level programming of MPI. For us, a key design principle is to ensure that the ability to parallelize work does not get in the way of existing code. This allows everyday engineers and scientists to ease into parallel programming. Also, a software environment needs to separate the algorithms from the backend hardware so that code is portable and maintainable. MathWorks parallel computing solution has done just this by enabling the same code to run in multiple environments without any code changes.

We’ve seen fantastic response to our parallel computing tools because they lower the barriers to entry; they make parallel and cluster computing accessible to everyday technical professionals who are focused on the business of engineering, science, and other flavors of technical computing.