Calling Farming in Matlab

NetSolve provides Matlab user with a convenient interface whereby he can make multiple requests to the same NetSolve program possibly with different arguments. This facility is useful in task farming problems like Monte Carlo simulation where multiple simulation runs are executed across different machines and the results from the simulation runs are combined to form the final output.

The Matlab task farming uses "cell" function calls in Matlab. The NetSolve user needs to have Matlab version 6.2 and higher to use this functionality.

The user calls the matlab task farm as

netsolve_farm(iterator string, problem name, argument cell 0, argument cell 1, ...)

The iterator string represents the number of requests to be made to the netsolve problem whose name is represented by problem name argument. The value of the iterator string assumes the form "i=0,". The netsolve arguments needed by the netsolve problem are passed as cells. Each cell is a one-dimensional array and the size of the cell is equal to the number of requests in the farming. Each element in the cell corresponds to a single argument need by the NetSolve problem. The i-th element corresponds to the argument for the i-th request in the farm.