## Nvidia GT 750M GPU performance on a MacBook Pro using MATLAB

April 8th, 2015

I recently got a 15 inch Retina Macbook Pro which contains an NVIDIA GT 750M GPU. It’s been a while since I last got a laptop with a decent GPU in it so I wondered how it would perform in MATLAB using the Parallel Computing Toolbox.

Of course I didn’t read any documentation; I simply fired up MATLAB 2015a and issued the gpuDevice command.

>> gpuDevice
Error using gpuDevice (line 26)
There is a problem with the CUDA driver or with this GPU device. Be sure
that you have a supported GPU and that the latest driver is installed.

Caused by:
The CUDA driver could not be loaded. The library name used was
'/usr/local/cuda/lib/libcuda.dylib'. The error was:
dlopen(/usr/local/cuda/lib/libcuda.dylib, 10): image not found

This is because I didn’t install a load of CUDA-related stuff! Following these instructions did the trick!

>> gpuDevice()

ans =

Name: 'GeForce GT 750M'
Index: 1
ComputeCapability: '3.0'
SupportsDouble: 1
DriverVersion: 6.5000
ToolkitVersion: 6.5000
MaxShmemPerBlock: 49152
MaxGridSize: [2.1475e+09 65535 65535]
SIMDWidth: 32
TotalMemory: 2.1470e+09
AvailableMemory: 444055552
MultiprocessorCount: 2
ClockRateKHz: 925500
ComputeMode: 'Default'
GPUOverlapsTransfers: 1
KernelExecutionTimeout: 1
CanMapHostMemory: 1
DeviceSupported: 1
DeviceSelected: 1

I headed over to the MATLAB File Exchange to get the GPU Bench App for MATLAB and fired it up. The summary of the results is below. Click on the image to see the detailed results.

The double precision performance of this GPU card is very poor – MUCH slower than the CPU on the Macbook Pro.

Looking on the bright side, the numbers for the CPU are pretty good for a laptop!

## Software you lose when leaving a university: MATLAB

February 19th, 2015

I’ve been working at The University of Manchester for almost a decade and will be leaving at the end of this week! A huge part of my job was to support a major subset of Manchester’s site licensed application software portfolio so naturally I’ve made use of a lot of it over the years. As of February 20th, I will no longer be entitled to use any of it!

This article is the second in a series where I’ll look at some of the software that’s become important to me and what my options are on leaving Manchester.  Here, I consider MATLAB – a technical computing environment that has come to dominate my career at Manchester. For the last 10 years, I’ve used MATLAB at least every week, if not most days.

I had a standalone license for MATLAB and several toolboxes – Simulink, Image Processing, Parallel Computing, Statistics and Optimization. Now, I’ve got nothing! Unfortunately for me, I’ve also got hundreds of scripts, mex files and a few Simulink models that I can no longer run! These are my options:

Go somewhere else that has a MATLAB site license

• I’ll soon be joining the University of Sheffield who have a MATLAB site license. A great option if you can do it.

Use something else

• Octave – Octave is a pretty good free and open source clone of MATLAB and quite a few of my programs would work without modification. Others would require some rewriting and, in some cases, that rewriting could be extensive! There is no Simulink support.
• Scilab – It’s free and it’s MATLAB-like-ish but I’d have to rewrite my code most of the time. I could also port some of my Simulink models to Scilab as was done in this link.
• Rewrite all my code to use something completely different. What I’d choose would depend on what I’m trying to achieve but options include Python, Julia and R among others.

Compile!

• If all I needed was the ability to run a few MATLAB applications I’d written, I could compile them using the MATLAB Compiler and keep the result. The whole point of the MATLAB Compiler is to distribute MATLAB applications to those who don’t have a MATLAB license. Of course once I’ve lost access to MATLAB itself, debugging and adding features will be  um……tricky!

Get a hobbyist license for MATLAB

• MATLAB Home – This is the full version of MATLAB for hobbyists. Writing a non-profit blog such as WalkingRandomly counts as a suitable ‘hobby’ activity so I could buy this license. MATLAB itself for 85 pounds with most of the toolboxes coming in at an extra 25 pounds each. Not bad at all! The extra cost of the toolboxes would still lead me to obsess over how to do things without toolboxes but, to be honest, I think that’s an obsession I’d miss if it weren’t there! Buying all of the same toolboxes as I had before would end up costing me a total of £210+VAT.
• Find a MOOC that comes with free MATLAB – Mathworks make MATLAB available for free for students of some online courses such as the one linked to here. Bear in mind, however, that the license only lasts for the duration of the course.

If I were to stay in academia but go to an institution with no MATLAB license, I could buy myself an academic standalone license for MATLAB and the various toolboxes I’m interested in. The price lists are available at http://uk.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing/

For reference, current UK academic prices are

• MATLAB £375 + VAT
• Standard Toolboxes (statistics, optimisation, image processing etc) £150 +VAT each
• Premium Toolboxes (MATLAB Compiler, MATLAB Coder etc) – Pricing currently not available

My personal mix of MATLAB, Simulink and 4 toolboxes would set me back £1350 + VAT.

Commercial Use

If I were to use MATLAB professionally and outside of academia, I’d need to get a commercial license. Prices are available from the link above which, at the time of writing, are

• MATLAB £1600 +VAT
• Standard Toolboxes £800 +VAT each
• Premium Toolboxes – Pricing currently not available

My personal mix of MATLAB, Simulink and 4 toolboxes would set me back £7200 + VAT.

Contact MathWorks

If anyone does find themselves in a situation where they have MATLAB code and no means to run it, then they can always try contacting MathWorks and ask for help in finding a solution.

## Popular Linear Algebra MOOC switches from IPython to MATLAB

January 27th, 2015

Linear Algebra – Foundations to Frontiers (or LAFF to its friends) is a popular, high quality and free MOOC that, as the title suggests, teaches aspects of linear algebra in a way that takes the student from the very basics through to some cutting edge techniques. I worked through much of it last year and thoroughly enjoyed the approach it took — focusing on programming aspects from the very beginning. The course authors are also among the developers of the FLAME project, a high performance linear algebra library, and one of the interesting aspects of the LAFF course (for me at least) was that it taught linear algebra in a way that also allowed you to understand the approaches used in the algorithms behind FLAME.

Last year, all of the programming assignments in LAFF were done in Python, making use of the IPython notebook. This year, the software stack will be different and will be based on MATLAB. I understand that everyone who signs up to LAFF will be able to get a free MATLAB license from Mathworks for the duration of the course. Understandably, this caused quite a bit of discussion between the LAFF team and software/language geeks like me. In a recent Facebook thread, I asked about the switch and received the reply

‘MATLAB will be free during the course. There are open source equivalents, but Mathworks staff is supporting the use of MATLAB (staff for us). There were some who never got the IPython notebooks to work properly. We are really excited at the opportunity to innovate again and perhaps clear up snags in the programming issues we had. It was complicated to support IPython on all of the operating systems and machines that participants use. MATLAB promises to be easier and will allow us again to concentrate on the Linear Algebra’ – LAFF UTx

I’m sufficiently interested in this change from IPython to MATLAB that I’ll be signing up for the course again this year and I encourage you to do the same — I believe that the programming-centric teaching approach taken by LAFF is extremely well done and your time would be well-spent working through the course.

Here’s the trailer for last year’s course.

## Engineering Textbook Companions using Scilab

October 22nd, 2014

Many engineering textbooks such as Ogata’s Modern Control Engineering include small code examples written in languages such as MATLAB. If you don’t have access to MATLAB and if the examples don’t run in GNU Octave for some reason, the value of these textbooks is reduced.

Professor Kannan M. Moudgalya et al of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay have developed an ambitious project that has ported the code examples of over 400 textbooks to the open-source computational system, Scilab.

The Textbook Companion Project has free Scilab code for textbooks from a range of subject areas including Fluid Mechanics,  Control Systems, Chemical Engineering and Digital Electronics.

## Python notes for MATLAB users

September 22nd, 2014

The Mathematics department at The University of Manchester runs a third year undergraduate module called ‘Problem solving by computer’ which invites students to solve complex mathematical problems by doing a little programming. Along with some interesting mathematics, the course exposes students to a wide variety of languages and numerical libraries including MATLAB, Octave, NAG, Mathematica and, most recently, Python.

Earlier this year, Python was introduced as an option for students who wanted to use it for a project in this course and, despite only being given two lectures in the language, quite a few people chose to use it. Much of this success must be attributed to the Python for MATLABers notes written by Manchester PhD student, Sophia Coban which is why I’m providing links to them here.

## MATLAB’s Mersenne Twister Random Number Generator: Seed 0 gives the same numbers as Seed 5489

June 18th, 2014

Something that became clear from my recent comparison of Numpy’s Mersenne Twister implementation with MATLAB’s is that there is something funky going on with seed 0 in MATLAB. A discussion in the comments thread helped uncover what was going on. In short, seed 0 gives exactly the same random numbers as seed 5489 in MATLAB (unless you use their deprecated rand(‘twister’,0) syntax).

This is a potential problem for anyone who performs lots of simulations that make use of random numbers such as monte-carlo simulations. One common work-flow is to run the same program hundreds of times where only the seed differs between runs. This is probably good enough to ensure that each simulation uses a random number stream that is statistically independent from all of the others — There is a risk that some streams will overlap but the probability is low and most people are content to live with that risk.

The practical upshot of this is that if you intend on sticking with Mersenne Twister for your MATLAB monte-carlo simulations, it might be wise to avoid seed 0. Alternatively, move to a random number generator that guarantees non-overlapping, independent streams – something that any implementation of Mersenne Twister cannot do.

Here’s a demo run in MATLAB 2014a on Windows 7.

>> format long
>> rng(0)
>> rand(1,5)'

ans =

0.814723686393179
0.905791937075619
0.126986816293506
0.913375856139019
0.632359246225410

>> rng(5489)
>> rand(1,5)'

ans =

0.814723686393179
0.905791937075619
0.126986816293506
0.913375856139019
0.632359246225410

## Reproducing MATLAB random numbers in Python

June 16th, 2014

When porting code between MATLAB and Python, it is sometimes useful to produce the exact same set of random numbers for testing purposes.  Both Python and MATLAB currently use the Mersenne Twister generator by default so one assumes this should be easy…and it is…provided you use the generator in Numpy and avoid the seed 0.

Generate some random numbers in MATLAB

Here, we generate the first 5 numbers for 3 different seeds in MATLAB. Our aim is to reproduce these in Python.

>> format long
>> rng(0)
>> rand(1,5)'

ans =

0.814723686393179
0.905791937075619
0.126986816293506
0.913375856139019
0.632359246225410

>> rng(1)
>> rand(1,5)'

ans =

0.417022004702574
0.720324493442158
0.000114374817345
0.302332572631840
0.146755890817113

>> rng(2)
>> rand(1,5)'

ans =

0.435994902142004
0.025926231827891
0.549662477878709
0.435322392618277
0.420367802087489

Python’s default random module

According to the documentation,Python’s random module uses the Mersenne Twister algorithm but the implementation seems to be different from MATLAB’s since the results are different.  Here’s the output from a fresh ipython session:

In [1]: import random

In [2]: random.seed(0)

In [3]: [random.random() for _ in range(5)]
Out[3]:
[0.8444218515250481,
0.7579544029403025,
0.420571580830845,
0.25891675029296335,
0.5112747213686085]

In [4]: random.seed(1)

In [5]: [random.random() for _ in range(5)]
Out[5]:
[0.13436424411240122,
0.8474337369372327,
0.763774618976614,
0.2550690257394217,
0.49543508709194095]

In [6]: random.seed(2)

In [7]: [random.random() for _ in range(5)]
Out[7]:
[0.9560342718892494,
0.9478274870593494,
0.05655136772680869,
0.08487199515892163,
0.8354988781294496]

The Numpy random module

Numpy’s random module, on the other hand, seems to use an identical implementation to MATLAB for seeds other than 0. In the below, notice that for seeds 1 and 2, the results are identical to MATLAB’s. For a seed of zero, they are different.

In [1]: import numpy as np

In [2]: np.set_printoptions(suppress=True)

In [3]: np.set_printoptions(precision=15)

In [4]: np.random.seed(0)

In [5]: np.random.random((5,1))
Out[5]:
array([[ 0.548813503927325],
[ 0.715189366372419],
[ 0.602763376071644],
[ 0.544883182996897],
[ 0.423654799338905]])

In [6]: np.random.seed(1)

In [7]: np.random.random((5,1))
Out[7]:
array([[ 0.417022004702574],
[ 0.720324493442158],
[ 0.000114374817345],
[ 0.30233257263184 ],
[ 0.146755890817113]])

In [8]: np.random.seed(2)

In [9]: np.random.random((5,1))
Out[9]:
array([[ 0.435994902142004],
[ 0.025926231827891],
[ 0.549662477878709],
[ 0.435322392618277],
[ 0.420367802087489]])

Checking a lot more seeds

Although the above interactive experiments look convincing, I wanted to check a few more seeds. All seeds from 0 to 1 million would be a good start so I wrote a MATLAB script that generated 10 random numbers for each seed from 0 to 1 million and saved the results as a .mat file.

A subsequent Python script loads the .mat file and ensures that numpy generates the same set of numbers for each seed. It outputs every seed for which Python and MATLAB differ.

On my mac, I opened a bash prompt and ran the two scripts as follows

matlab -nodisplay -nodesktop -r "generate_matlab_randoms"
python python_randoms.py

The output was

MATLAB file contains 1000001 seeds and 10 samples per seed
Random numbers for seed 0 differ between MATLAB and Numpy

System details

• Late 2013 Macbook Air
• MATLAB 2014a
• Python 2.7.7
• Numpy 1.8.1

## Chapter 1 of ‘The MATLAB Guide’ converted to IPython notebook

May 16th, 2014

One of my favourite MATLAB books is The MATLAB Guide by Desmond and Nicholas Higham. The first chapter, called ‘A Brief Tutorial’ shows how various mathematical problems can be easily explored with MATLAB; things like continued fractions, random fibonacci sequences, fractals and collatz iterations.

Over at the SIAM blog, Don MacMillen, demonstrates how its now possible, trivial even, to rewrite the entire chapter as an IPython notebook with all MATLAB code replaced with Python.

The notebook is available as a gist and can be viewed statically on nbviewer.

What other examples of successful MATLAB->Python conversions have you found?

## MATLAB Home Edition launched

March 11th, 2014

If you’ve ever wanted to use MATLAB to develop personal projects or as a hobby but have been put off by the eye-watering commercial prices, the new MATLAB Home edition might be for you.

For £85 you get full powered MATLAB without any toolboxes. This is the same version that the professionals use but there are various restrictions on its use. The FAQ states “The MATLAB® Home license is for your personal use only. It is not available for government, academic, research, commercial, or other organizational use.”

It is possible to buy toolboxes for an extra £25 each but, at the time of writing at least, it is not possible to buy ALL available toolboxes on the home license.

Some of Mathworks’ competitors have had similar home-use licenses available for some time – Mathematica and Maple to name two – it’s great to see MATLAB added to this list.

Other WalkingRandomly posts you may be interested in

## Floating point addition is not associative

February 28th, 2014

A lot of people don’t seem to know this….and they should. When working with floating point arithmetic, it is not necessarily true that a+(b+c) = (a+b)+c. Here is a demo using MATLAB

>> x=0.1+(0.2+0.3);
>> y=(0.1+0.2)+0.3;
>> % are they equal?
>> x==y

ans =
0

>> % lets look
>> sprintf('%.17f',x)
ans =
0.59999999999999998

>> sprintf('%.17f',y)
ans =
0.60000000000000009

These results have nothing to do with the fact that I am using MATLAB. Here’s the same thing in Python

>>> x=(0.1+0.2)+0.3
>>> y=0.1+(0.2+0.3)
>>> x==y
False
>>> print('%.17f' %x)
0.60000000000000009
>>> print('%.17f' %y)
0.59999999999999998

If this upsets you, or if you don’t understand why, I suggest you read the following

Does anyone else out there have suggestions for similar resources on this topic?