MATLAB cluster on AWS-EC2 - vCPU utilization

Dear Matlab users,

I have set up a Matlab cluster on AWS-EC2 for a parallel computation task. When setting up the infrastructure, I selected the 'm6a.8xlarge' cluster, which works with 16 physical and 32 virtual CPU cores. Parpool connects to 16 cores, the code uses 50% of CPU (as read from the task manager). Is there a way to make use of the virtual cores as well? That is, is it possible to connect to 32 workers (32 vCPU units) and utilize the physical CPU at 100%?

This question likely reflects my limited understanding of online computing. I could not find an explanation for it by browsing the Matlab community (questions and tutorials).

Edit: Initially, Matlab on AWS-EC2 threw an error, which I bypassed using the instructions in the link below.

https://nl.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2097811-why-do-i-receive-the-error-your-mathworks-account-is-not-linked-to-a-matlab-parallel-server-license

Thank you for your help.

Kind regards,

Vasja

Answer 1

[vasja sivec]

Upon further reading, I discovered that MATLAB restricts the number of workers in `parpool` to be equal to the number of physical CPU cores when working with the Cloud Center. Therefore, one cannot utlize all vCPUs.

Specifically, MATLAB's documentation states: "Cloud Center supports at most one worker per physical core. Although Amazon Web Services machines can have many virtual cores, Cloud Center restricts use to at most one worker per physical core for optimal performance."

https://nl.mathworks.com/help/cloudcenter/ug/choose-supported-ec2-instance-machine-types.html