Establishing a MATLAB session on melodic

In order for you to be able to run Matlab outside of the lab time in 188, Matlab is installed on a UNIX computer (melodic.ucdavis.edu) which is running the Linux operating system and has user accounts for each of you. I have put together a help page with basic Unix commands.

To connect with a Matlab session on melodic from the PCs in this lab or from any other PC, one has to go through several steps:

1. Open a command window on the PC
2. Login to melodic using ssh
3. Start a VNC server (X-Windows) session on melodic, by typing 'runvnc' at the prompt
4. Connect to the VNC server using the VNC client/viewer on the PC
5. Launch Matlab from within the VNC viewer

The steps for establishing the VNC connection are detailed here.

The reason for using VNC is that the Matlab interface, especially when it is run in Java mode, is very graphics intensive and becomes excruciatingly sluggish if it has to display all of its graphics windows on a different computer. When Matlab is run within a VNC session, all of the windows are displayed in the VNC session on the remote computer, which then compresses the graphics and sends them to the local client (the computer you are sitting at) where it renders them. A nice feature of this is that your VNC session on melodic is portable from one computer to another. This means that you can leave your Matlab job running, close your connection to the VNC session, go to a different computer, establish a connection to the VNC session from that computer, and continue where you left off.