MATLAB: Matlabpool open n; doesn’t work.

Question

Hi,

I'd like to open matlabpool with a variable number of cores, to use the maximum number of cores available. So n would equal features('numCores') here.

But matlabpool open n, matlabpool open features('numCores'), matlabpool open maxNumCompThreads don't work here. matlabpool open seems to accept only numbers and not variables.

I could do something stupid like

if features('numCores') == 4
matlabpool open 4;
elseif features('numCores') == 2
matlabpool open 2;
end

but I'd like to know if something more elegant exists.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is because writing arguments like this:

 matlabpool open 2

is the same as passing the strings 'open' and '2' to the matlabpool function, i.e. the equivalent to

 matlabpool('open','2')

What you can do is to call matlabpool like this:

 matlabpool('open', num2str(features('numCores')))

Possibly you can also pass the number of cores directly, but since I do not have parallell computing toolbox I can't test it, like so:

 matlabpool('open', features('numCores'))