Business Case Study

MathWorks

About

MathWorks is the creator of MATLAB, Simulink, and more than 90 add-on products that engineers and scientists apply to their exploration, design, and development efforts.

MATLAB and Simulink products include techniques and tools for AI and data science, such as machine learning, deep learning, and signal and image processing, and for design and deployment of communications, automotive, robotics, and other research and production software and hardware systems.

MATLAB products are used throughout academia, research, and industry.

The challenge

Researchers using MATLAB often need access to shared datasets too large to download locally. Similarly, they might need access to supercomputers to run their MATLAB programs.

EGI hosts data and has supercomputing resources, but MATLAB users need MATLAB on EGI to take advantage of these resources. In addition, multiple research communities share software toolboxes they develop in MATLAB. EGI could make these tools available on their platforms. Hosting MATLAB on EGI as part of the Jupyter environment allows MATLAB users to continue developing algorithms and use their code to perform data analysis on the cloud without having to change programming languages or environments. The MATLAB desktop IDE is available via a web-browser using the users’ licenses.

EGI DIH-MathWorks collaboration

MathWorks and EGI are partnering to offer a web-based version of MATLAB via EGI’s Jupyter environment, making the familiar MATLAB desktop environment accessible via a web browser.

All the standard MATLAB functionality is available via EGI’s hosted MATLAB, including:

Support for several scientific and standard data formats, including web data and those from specialized hardware.
Live Editor for building computational notebooks explaining workflows and results using MATLAB Live Scripts.
App Designer for creating graphical user interfaces or Apps
MATLAB Compiler for building, Web-Apps or standalone software for easy sharing.
MATLAB File Exchange hosts 40,000 shareable MATLAB software tools downloadable for free. GitHub repos can be connected to File Exchange for increased visibility.
MATLAB in the Cloud allows MATLAB integration with cloud services including support for Docker containers

Users of Campus-, Institute- and Enterprise MATLAB licenses can use their email logins as credentials to access the service. All products and toolboxes covered by a user’s license will be available to that user on the EGI infrastructure.

New to MATLAB?

Learn MATLAB with MATLAB Onramp, a free, self-paced online tutorial
Download and try MATLAB on your personal computer with a MATLAB trial

Impact

The pilot enables MATLAB users to run MATLAB on EGI infrastructure to analyse and visualize data, develop algorithms, and share research output with others via the Jupyter framework hosted by EGI.

Many universities and research institutions already offer sitewide access to MATLAB, enabling all researchers, educators and students to use MATLAB and Simulink products. By MathWorks enabling EGI visitors to bring their licenses (BYOL) to EGI’s resources, users can use the same MATLAB functionality on EGI as they have access to on their desktops and on institutions’ infrastructure. This makes MATLAB users more effective, avoiding disruptions and gaps in the computing tool chain, enabling them to try out new tools, and providing more research innovation options via tighter connections to EGI’s compute and data.

Services used:

Notebooks