My Home Licence on AWS Workspace with Parallel Computing only allows max of 2 Workers

I have 4 core on AWS Workspace, but when I tried to set the max cores to use from the "Cluster Profile Manger" window, it says that "Profile allows only 2 workers".

Why make make Parallel Computing available in the Home License when it only allows 2? This looks like a MathWorks information ommission to entice hobbyists and learners to get the Home License inlcuding the Parallel Toolbox but not showing restriction of use where it only allows max of 2 cores.

I'm disappointed at this scam, since experimenting with the Machine Learning App for regerssion using GPR can take hours to run. I haven't even tried the examples in the Deep Learning Toolbox. That would be a one week experiment before one can get some results back, since there's no doubt that it's gonna take a whole week to run.

Can MathWorks please lift this restriction to a max of 4 cores?

The Home License Page says nothing about restrictions of the number of workers. Had I known that in advance, then I wouldn't have got the Parallel Toolbox since it would be a waste of time. Running Parallel Toolbox with 2 cores only, is no difference to just running the Matlab code with no Parallel Toolbox installed.

Answer 1

[Raymond Norris]

Hi Sione,

I'm going to check that the Home Edition doesn't impose any restrictions. With that said, could you clarify a few points:

1. The AWS instance you're running on, does it have 4 cores or 4 vCPU. If the latter, MATLAB sees that as 2 cores. Per AWS, a vCPU is 1/2 a physical core. This might explain why MATLAB throws the message (you still ought to be able to oversubscribe the worker count).
2. Is the message a warning or an error? By changing the worker count are not able to start a parallel pool?
3. What steps are you taking to get the message "Profile allows only 2 workers"?

• Are you modifying the Local profiles, specifically setting the NumWorkers property? The NumWorkersRange?
• Setting either of these shouldn't throw the message. Are you then going to the Validation and changing the "Number of workers to use" spinner value? If you extend the worker count, you'll see "Profile allows a maximum of X workers." (Slightly differnet than your message) and the validation does fail at Stage 3.

Raymond