Specify Your Parallel Preferences

You can access your parallel preferences in any of the following ways:

On the Home tab in the Environment section, select Parallel > Parallel Preferences
Select the desktop pool indicator icon, and select Parallel Preferences.
In the command window, type Preferences.
```
preferences
```
In the navigation tree of the Preferences dialog box, select Parallel Computing Toolbox.

The preferences dialog box with Parallel Computing Toolbox selected.

You can control your parallel preference settings as follows:

Default Profile — Choose the profile you want to use. The default profile is Processes. For more information, see Add and Modify Cluster Profiles.
Automatically create a parallel pool — If a parallel pool is not open, some functionality in Parallel Computing Toolbox™ will automatically create a parallel pool, including:
- parfor
- spmd
- distributed
- Composite
- parfeval
- parfevalOnAll
- afterEach
- afterAll
- gcp
- mapreduce
- mapreducer
- parsim (Simulink)
When these functions are used, select Automatically create a parallel pool to create a pool automatically. If you select this option, you do not need to open a pool manually using the parpool function.
If this option is not selected, a pool is not open, and you use any Parallel Computing Toolbox functionality, your code will run on the client.
Shut down and delete a parallel pool — To shut down a parallel pool automatically if the pool has been idle for the specified amount of time, use the IdleTimeout setting. If you use the pool (for example, using parfor or parfeval), the timeout counter is reset. When the timeout is about to expire, a tooltip on the desktop pool indicator warns you and allows you to reset the timer. Note that modifying this setting changes the IdleTimeout of any already started pool.

Version History

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R2023a: Preferred number of workers in a parallel pool option has been removed

The Preferred number of workers in a parallel pool option in Parallel Preferences has been removed. This change gives you more control over how many workers to start on nonlocal clusters. For MATLAB^® Job Scheduler, third-party schedulers, and cloud clusters, use the PreferredPoolNumWorkers property of your cluster profiles to specify the preferred number of workers to start in a parallel pool. For more details, see Pool Size and Cluster Selection. For the Processes and Threads profiles, use the NumWorkers property to specify the number of workers to start in a parallel pool.