IPSC-MATLAB Reference Manual

Abstract

IPSC-MATLAB is a programming environment for running MATLAB programs on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube. The system is designed such that the user can execute computationally intensive poitions of MATLAB programs on the hypercube, whereas all other code is executed on a Sun-4 workstation (SPARCstation). The workstation acts as a remote host for the hypercube. MATLAB variables can migrate from the front-end (workstation) to the back-end (hypercube) and vice versa. IPSC-MATLAB combines the flexibility of MATLAB programming with the speed of the Intel hypercube. Writing parallel programs in Fortran or C for the hypercube is a tedious task. Testing and debugging programs is difficult and time consuming. On the other hand, MATLAB, which runs on workstations, provides a convenient means of writing programs. However, because of the limited speed and memory of workstations, large problems cannot be solved. The hypercube is fast and has more memory. IPSC- MATLAB attempts to use the workstation as well as the hypercube to provide the user with a fast, flexible environment for programming.