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How to run MATLAB on ScienceCloud

  • Create an instance using one of the latest Singularity images. The latest images have *** prefix in their names. For instance, you could use ***Singularity on Ubuntu 20.04 (2023-11-06).

  • Install the latest updates and reboot

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo reboot

  • List available modules with module av

  • Select the version you would like to run and load it with module load matlab/r2023a The first time you load the module, the MATLAB container will be downloaded to your instance. Since MATLAB is quite large, it may take 15-20 minutes to complete. You will see no progress bar. Subsequently, the module will be loaded in less than a second.

  • Once the module is loaded, you can run MATLAB as you normally would. For example, you can test it with the following command.

matlab -r 'disp(magic(5)*magic(5)); exit'

Hints and suggestions

  • To run MATLAB with GUI, you would need to enable X forwarding while connecting to the instance. When using command line, this can be done by adding -X flag to your ssh command.

  • If you created an instance with a GPU, you might be able to use it with MATLAB if you also load the gpu module, e.g.

module load gpu matlab/r2021b

  • If you encounter the error: "Error using exit. Unrecognized function or variable 'Settings'.", run settings in MATLAB. That will properly initialise the settings and the error should disappear.

  • While it is possible to run several MATLAB versions on a single instance, you will run out of space very quickly due to their disk space requirements.