Parallelization of MATLAB for Euro50 integrated modeling

MATLAB and its companion product Simulink are commonly used tools insystems modelling and other scientific disciplines. A cross-disciplinaryintegrated MATLAB model is used to study the overall performance of theproposed 50m optical and infrared telescope, Euro50. However thecomputational requirements of this kind of end-to-end simulation of thetelescope's behaviour, exceeds the capability of an individualcontemporary Personal Computer. By parallelizing the model, primarily ona functional basis, it can be implemented across a Beowulf cluster ofgeneric PCs. This requires MATLAB to distribute in some way data andcalculations to the cluster nodes and combine completed results. Therehave been a number of attempts to produce toolkits to allow MATLAB to beused in a parallel fashion. They have used a variety of techniques. Herewe present findings from using some of these toolkits and proposedadvances