NAG, Star-P and MATLAB®
Supercomputing from Your Desktop
Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) and Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) have teamed to deliver
breakthrough productivity in programming parallel systems, clusters, and grids. Using Interactive
Supercomputing's Star-P platform, NAG users and MATLAB® users looking to solve ever larger problems
can leverage the quality and accuracy of the NAG libraries in a parallel computing environment. What are the NAG libraries? NAG specializes in creating software libraries for solving mathematical, statistical and data
mining problems. The NAG C Library is the largest and most comprehensive
collection of mathematical and statistical algorithms for C and C++ programmers available today.
The NAG Fortran Library contains nearly 1,500 routines making it the largest
commercially available collection of mathematical and statistical algorithms available. The
NAG SMP Library, used by some of the world's most prestigious
super computing centers, makes optimal use of the processing power and shared memory parallelism
of the Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) systems. The NAG Parallel Library enables
applications to take advantage of distributed memory parallel computers and was designed to be
as close as possible to equivalent routines in the NAG Fortran Library. Supercomputing Without Recoding Many MATLAB® users are facing the daunting prospect of recoding their application in C or
Fortran to run ever larger and more complex models that exceed the available power and
memory of their desktops. Many of these users also want to leverage the power and accuracy
of the NAG computational libraries from within MATLAB®. To address both of these challenges,
NAG and Interactive Supercomputing have teamed up to allow MATLAB® to access NAG functions
in a supercomputing environment using the Star-P parallel computing platform. Accessing NAG Libraries from Matlab using Star-P Connect Star-P Connect is a powerful API/SDK tool designed
to connect MATLAB® and other very high level languages (VHLLs) to powerful commercial libraries
such as the NAG C and Fortran libraries. Star-P Connect includes an Invocation API for the MATLAB®
programmer and a Server API for a C, C++ or FORTRAN programmer. The Server API consists of a
Data-Parallel component for adding and using MPI based functions such as those found in the NAG
Parallel Library, and an equivalent Task-Parallel component for interfacing with serial or
multi-threaded libraries such as those found in the NAG SMP library Adding a NAG Library Function in 4 Easy Steps Using Star-P Connect, a MATLAB® user can easily access NAG computing functions
for both task-parallel and data-parallel computing by following a simple four-step
process. Example: 1-D FFT of 4 GB Matrix For more information on the NAG libraries, please visit the NAG website:
www.nag.co.uk For a more detailed description of how to add NAG functions to MATLAB®, please refer to
Extending Star-P Computing with Numerical
Algorithms Group's Libraries.
A good example of the power of using Star-P to connect MATLAB® to powerful NAG functions is
the Fast Fourier transform (FFT) of a 4 GB matrix. As seen from this example, users can expect
a nearly linear reduction in processing time for a given number of processors.
