Programmatically pre-detect number of cores available to Parallel Computing Toolbox

Is there a way to detect the number of cores, i.e., the maximum number of non-oversubscribed workers that are available to a parallel pool in the Parallel Computing Toolbox, but without actually first opening a pool?

[Walter Roberson]

Which operating system?

[Matt J]

Windows 7 64-bit, as it happens. However, I'm looking for a programmatic way within MATLAB to do it, i.e., so that it is platform-independent.

Answer 1

[Edric Ellis]

Try this:

    c = parcluster('local'); % build the 'local' cluster object
    nw = c.NumWorkers        % get the number of workers

Of course, this is a maximum - the user might have specified in their parallel preferences to automatically open pools of a smaller size.

[Matt J]

Thanks, Edric. That works well.