Best hardware configuration for MATLAB
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Hi there!
I'm working for a tech company. We are building high performace workstations. Lots of CPU cores, RAM, GPUs.
Some of our clients want to know if our WS's are good for MATLAB. We are intersted in building balanced rigs.
So could you tell me how the software scales with cores, gpu power etc? What are the common bottlenecks? Are there any limitations when addional compute power won't add up?
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Accepted Answer
Rik
on 17 Aug 2022
The questions on this forum are mostly answered by volunteers. If you want an official answer you should contact support.
Apart from the guidance you might glean from the system requirements, there is little to go on. In my experience the performance depends so highly on the workload, that the question does not make much sense. However, I will make an attempt.
GPUs are only used in some workflows (and require specific toolboxes), so they tend to matter little for performance.
Since most of Matlab is singlethreaded, the singlethreaded performance is the most important factor of a CPU. Intel or AMD doesn't matter much for recent releases, but some older releases had bugs with some mathematical instruction set. Note that some functions are multithreaded. One example I noticed is conv (and convn).
RAM only matters as much as you work with large arrays. Matlab is not a web browser, so it needs memory itself as well. More is better, but if you only work with small arrays, benefits drop off fast.
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Joss Knight
on 20 Aug 2022
Most multithreaded MATLAB functions use a scheduling system which is going to do its best to make use of available compute without causing memory issues or other queue related problems. This usually works pretty well. Many algorithms are just fundamentally not parallelizable of course. A good rule of thumb is that if your MATLAB code is highly vectorized it will likely be well parallelized. Don't know whether that helps at all...
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