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MATLAB Basics

Description

MATLAB, which stands for MATrix LABoratory, is a popular, powerful, general-purpose system or environment for matrix algebra calculations and many other more specific computations and applications in Biology, Aerospace, Finance, data acquisition, etc. MATLAB may be used interactively or in batch. In addition, it supports a wide array of graphical applications, ranging from bar charts, line and surface plots to volumetric rendering.

Availability and Setup

MATLAB version R2013a is available on the SCC. MATLAB version R2011a is available on the Katana Cluster.

Those who may wish to install MATLAB on their own computers, rather than using it on our systems, should consult the MATLAB licenses page.

To enable graphics, MATLAB should be invoked under the X Window System on X terminals or workstations. To do this, you must first set your DISPLAY environment variable to allow you to run this X Application and allow it to display graphics on your local machine/terminal. You may also want to set the environment variable TERM to be xterm

Users accessing SCV clusters to run MATLAB from a Windows PC will need to install the freely downloadable x-win32.

Running MATLAB Interactively

Running MATLAB interactively in the default mode enables graphics. This requires X Forwarding (X-Win 32) to run it. To invoke MATLAB on the SCC, type:

    scc1% matlab

    >>

The MATLAB command prompt, >>, signifies that you have succesfully started the MATLAB environment. To close the MATLAB session, enter exit or quit:

    >> exit

On clients without xterm or if graphics is not needed, starts MATLAB with graphics disabled:

    scc1% matlab -nodisplay

    >>

Running MATLAB in Batch

See our page on Running MATLAB Batch Jobs on Katana

Help/Documentation

To get started with MATLAB, you can visit our in-house Introduction to MATLAB tutorial. Alternatively, you can go to The Mathworks, MATLAB’s developer, site to learn from their MATLAB video tutorials on a wide range of applications. More frequently, users get help from within the MATLAB environment using the command help followed by the name of the utility function. For example,

    >> help cos

If you don’t know the name of the utility, you can search with a succinct description (enclosed in single quotes to preserve spaces if multiple words are used) of the application, like this:

    >> lookfor cosine
    acos                           - Inverse cosine, result in radians.
    acosd                          - Inverse cosine, result in degrees.
    acosh                          - Inverse hyperbolic cosine.
    cos                            - Cosine of argument in radians.
    cosd                           - Cosine of argument in degrees.
    cosh                           - Hyperbolic cosine.
    . . .

To read the MATLAB documentation

    >> help doc

Document Name: matlab
Author/Maintainer: Aaron D. Fuegi (aarondf@bu.edu) and Kadin Tseng (kadin@bu.edu)
Executable: /usr/local/bin/matlab
Keywords: matlab, plotting, math
Machines List: SCC, Katana Cluster, ACS Cluster
Related Help Pages: MATLAB Examples, MATLAB IT Help, MATLAB Tutorial
Created August 16, 1996; Last Revised May 21, 2013; Last Modified May 21, 2013
URL of this document: http://www.bu.edu/tech/about/research/training/scv-software-packages/matlab/
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