EGEE develop grid-friendly MATLAB

by Danielle Venton, EGEE.

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Researchers from disciplines as disparate as laser physics and finance, have a new computing tool at their fingertips: MATLAB can now run on the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) infrastructure.

Matlab is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables users to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. Widely regarded as a powerful piece of simulation software, for use in everything from vector analysis to optimising the controls for a rocket launch, it is now fully compatible with any grid computing system using the gLite middleware.

‘Our motivation for incorporating this tool was rather straightforward. MATLAB is one of the most popular and important general-purpose scientific software tools. A large number of grid users from a multitude of scientific disciplines have been requesting for a long time to be able to run MATLAB applications within EGEE’s gLite infrastructure’ says Vangelis Floros, who helps to coordinate and manage the EGEE user community and application support activities.

‘Through our collaboration with The Mathworks (creators of MATLAB) we managed to achieve a very efficient integration between the two platforms — MDCS and gLite — on the technical level. Usage of the software is still in the trial phase’ says Vangelis Floros, ‘currently, we are working very closely with [The Mathworks] to define a grid-friendly licensing model in order to be able to offer it very soon for production-level exploitation.’

www.eu-egee.org

Making better lasers

Research fellow  Pavlo Ivanov from the University of Bristol, is seeking to improve fiber-optic telecommunication networks by making better semiconductor lasers with the use of MATLAB on EGEE.

‘Making a new laser is very expensive’ says Ivanov. ‘Improving design by trial and error would be a disaster. Laser researchers need to optimise their designs prior to fabrication, and MATLAB can help me understand how the lasers are behaving.’

If Ivanov can build a high-power, single-mode laser, it could translate into better quality and longer distance telecommunications. Ivanov hopes to present his most recent findings at the EGEE’09 conference in Barcelona this September.

Finance

Spyros Skouras of the Athens University of Business Economics and Business, is examining financial market data.

‘To examine a market’s microstructure, we use data that are time stamped at the millisecond level, and measure tens of variables for thousands of financial instruments’ says Skouras. ‘Such a fine-grained view can shed light on issues of relevance to academics as well as professional traders’.

Skouras believes many researchers working in finance, economics, econometrics, statistics and other fields may become users of EGEE if they become aware of how accessible the grid has become, now that they can interface with the MATLAB tools they are familiar with.