Do concurrent processes, run in individuals windows, on multiple cores, require multiple licenes?

Enabling a process for a customer. Will be suggesting that they buy a multi-core workstation and drive much of the application to a GPU, however the best use of resources will be to create concurrent processes. Does this require a license for each launched process?

Answer 1

[Jason Ross]

You will defintely need to have the Parallel Computing Toolbox to access the GPU from MATLAB. The 12 core limit is for the "local" schedeuler, which is also part of the Parallel Computing Toolbox. This will enable the use of parfor, spmd, job/task and batch constructs that will allow parallel/distributed computing.

If you are going to buy a workstation and try and use all 12 cores, keep the following in mind:

• Make sure you are counting real cores, not "virtualized" or "hyper-threaded" ones. If you are doing compute-heavy work, you will be using the FPU and tasks will queue up on the processor waiting for math operations to complete.
• Use 2 GB RAM per worker process and one worker per core as a starting point. If you want to run 12 workers, start with 24 GB RAM and go up from there.
• Starting a matlabpool is very similar to starting an instance of MATLAB. If you are going to be doing this a lot, consider specing out a SSD in the workstation (at least for the OS and applications), as application start-up time will be reduced considerably versus a spinning hard drive.

And if you want to just open multiple windows, you can do that with base MATLAB.

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

No, I don't believe so. I have 8 cores on my computer and have only one license. In fact, just the opposite is true: my license is good for installation on several computers (work, home, etc.) Also, you'd be hard pressed to find a computer these days that is NOT multi-core, and if they required people to buy 4 or 8 licenses for each computer they would lose a lot of customers.

[Walter Roberson]

This is correct. With the current MATLAB, up to 12 cores may be used without additional license, other than possibly the Parallel Processing Toolbox (depending on how you program, but likely as it also has the GPU access) Beyond 12 cores, or using multiple systems requires additional licenses.

Note that there are restrictions on having multiple threads access the GPU, and I think you might need R2012b for that (not sure.)