<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>I think I understand why people want the toolboxes - it makes coding easy. From what I've seen people then stay with the "prototype" code and never move to a compiled language such as C or Fortran. It's been a long, long time, but I did all of my code prototyping for my PhD in Matlab and rewrote it in Fortran. I was easily able to get a 10x speedup. I guess people don't like 10x improvements in performance any more :)<br><br>An option for people is to use the Matlab compiler to build faster code. I've never used it but the reports I've seen is that it works quite well. I'm not sure about how the toolboxes work with it - whether you compile them as well or they run as interpreted along with the compiled code.<br><br>Octave has a number of toolboxes. I'm not sure if it covers what various
people are doing, but they are out there.<br><br>For larger problems, what about using ScaleMP? You can get a very large SMP system for running large problems. You may not need the extra CPUs, but they do get you the extra memory. That's one of the neat things about ScaleMP. You buy a couple of nodes with really fast CPUs and memory, and then buy the remaining nodes with really slow processors (cheap) with lots of memory. This allows you to tailor the SMP box to the application. Just be sure to run the code on the fastest CPUs (numactl).<br><br>Thanks for the feedback.<br><br>Jeff<br><br></div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Tim Cutts <tjrc@sanger.ac.uk><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> Jeff Layton
<laytonjb@att.net><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cc:</span></b> landman@scalableinformatics.com; Beowulf Mailing List <beowulf@beowulf.org><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Sunday, December 28, 2008 4:24:51 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [Beowulf] Hadoop<br></font><br>
<br>On 27 Dec 2008, at 9:04 pm, Jeff Layton wrote:<br><br>> I hate to tangent (hijack?) this subject, but I'm curious about your <br>> class poll. Did the people who were interested in Matlab consider <br>> Octave?<br><br>I can't speak for Joe's class, but when I've asked Matlab users here <br>about using Octave instead, they're generally not interested. Partly <br>this is a somewhat irrational "it doesn't have Matlab on the cover" <br>thing, but largely it's the Matlab toolboxes they want access to.<br><br>A recurrent theme we find with anyone doing stuff with any similar <br>package, be it Matlab, Stata, R or whatever, is that they always hit <br>massive difficulties when they try to scale up their analysis to <br>larger problem sizes. If they come to me early in their project, I <br>will point this out in advance, and suggest that while such languages <br>are great
for prototyping, they don't scale well. Usually, of course, <br>the warning is ignored (they didn't pay for this advice, so no need to <br>take it, right?) and six months down the line their stuff doesn't work <br>any more when they try to run it on large production datasets, and I <br>have to avoid the "I told you so" speech... :-)<br><br></div></div></div></body></html>