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Cloud Computing and Science – MATLAB on Clouds

By Krishnan Subramanian on November 18, 2008

I am a strong advocate of using Cloud Computing in Science. I had talked about it in my post on LHC Computing and, again, when I wrote about Mathematica embracing the clouds. Through Jinesh’s post on AWS Blog, I came across a whitepaper that explains how one can run MATLAB, proprietary technical computing software from Mathworks, on Amazon EC2. The whitepaper can be downloaded here.

MATLAB is a very powerful, although proprietary, tool for running complex numerical computations, data analysis and plotting. It is widely used by academic community for scientific calculations. It is based on a MATLAB language called M-Code and it can be used as an interpretive shell or using a script. The language is very simple but a powerful one. It can be used from simple classical mechanics problems to signal analysis to circuit analysis to chemical engg computations to systems biology. Such a widespread use has resulted in MATLAB being used by more than a million users, mostly in the academia.

With the ability to run MATLAB on EC2, scientists could run parallel computations on a collection of EC2 instances. This will save them valuable grant money and time as they can just fire up the needed EC2 instances, run their programs and shut down the instances as soon as they are done. They need not buy expensive high end computers or wait for their turn to use computing resources in some large research institutions. Use of cloud computing, with its utility nature, can help scientists focus on science instead of worrying about finding the necessary computational resources.

As I have told in my article on LHC computing, I am very much interested in hearing about how scientists use cloud computing in their research work. We strongly welcome comments from such people and encourage them to share their story as guest posts in this blog.

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Krish is an analyst and researcher focussed on high impact topics in the areas such as Cloud Computing, Open Source and the interface between them. Krish also evangelizes Open Source and Cloud Computing on various media outlets, public speaking and blogs. Krish is part of a boutique analyst firm that offers strategic advise to both Cloud Computing and Open Source vendors. They also help buy side businesses take advantage of Open Source and Cloud Computing. More information about Krish and his research can be found in his personal website. Krish's disclosure statement is available here.

4 responses to “Cloud Computing and Science – MATLAB on Clouds”

  1. PuneTech » Lecture and Demo of SAGE Mathematical Software - 23 Jan » Technology in Pune
    PuneTech » Lecture and Demo of SAGE Mathematical Software - 23 Jan » Technology in Pune January 19, 2009 at 9:44 pm |

    [..] Cloud Computing and Science – MATLAB on Clouds [..]

  2. Francesca
    Francesca August 18, 2009 at 3:12 am |

    Hi Krishnan – given the post, thought you might be interested in Monkey Analytics which provides a modern web interface on top of back end computation engines – one of which is MATLAB compatible GNU Octave. This web app lives in the cloud, and scales to meet subscriber demand on Amazon EC2. We’d love to know what you think. ~Francesca

  3. Joining the discussions « Monkey Analytics Blog
    Joining the discussions « Monkey Analytics Blog August 19, 2009 at 3:48 am |

    [..] Now that we are live, we are starting to join the many discussions about how engineering / math / science computation will change as the benefits of the cloud have become apparent.  Two bloggers we’ve been following –Krishnan Subramanianand [..]

  4. Ali A. Yassin
    Ali A. Yassin March 30, 2011 at 4:17 pm |

    Thank you for this information but i need most knoweldege about cloud computing in the matlab