A Comparative Analysis of Localized Command Line Execution, Remote Execution through Command Line, and Torque Submissions of Matlab(R) Scripts for the Charting of CReSIS Flight Path Data

Members: JerNettie Burney and Robyn Evans
Mentor: Je'aime Powell
Key Words: ANOVA, binary, cluster, jobs, Linux, MATLAB®, node, Polar Grid, ssh, TORQUE

The Polar Grid team was tasked with providing the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) with data that would allow signal processing through the CReSIS Synthetic Aperture RADAR Processor (CSARP) to utilize clustered computing resources without the need of MATLAB’s® proprietary Distributed Computing Environment. This research centered on the use of MATLAB® through command line, and scripted distribution through TORQUE high performance computing scheduling.

The team used flight path information from the Greenland 2007 field deployment. This data was imported into MATLAB® so that they could be converted from text files into actual MATLAB® script files. With these MEX files, the team was able to create a script within MATLAB® that could plot the flight path data into a graph with the axes of the graph being labeled latitude for the x-axis and longitude for the y-axis.

The team took the master script for the creation of the chart and ran jobs through the command line of MATLAB® to Madogo [Elizabeth City State University’s Cluster] and Quarry [Indiana University’s Cluster]. The team was then able to compare execution times from the jobs of Madogo versus Quarry. A second comparison was then tested with TORQUE job submission versus MATLAB® submission to see which performed with greater efficiency. Lastly the average execution times of all three data sets were statistically compared with a 5% significance level to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the use of command line jobs verses TORQUE submission. The paper focuses upon the procedure used in order to complete the research along with the conclusion reached.