Donnerstag, 7. Juli 2011

AAAARRRRRRGH!! Matlab!!

Happy Matlab licensing trouble - yay!

We have 5 Matlab licenses in our lab. Originally, we bought them as "Concurrent licenses", that is, Matlab allowed us to have 5 instances of Matlab running in parallel, regardless which computer they are running on. At some point, Mathworks somehow transformed these licenses into "Designated Computer" licenses, that is, each license must be associated with a designated computer and will only run on that machine. Although this was an obviously bad deal, we didn't care too much about that change back then, since we were busy doing more important stuff than caring about licensing issues.

Anyway, Matlab is a dying species in our lab since most of us are using Python for scientific computing, except for a few legacy scripts. But every now and then, I need to run one of those legacy scripts.

I do much development on my laptop, but for numbercrunching I use our compute server. Hence, I need my computing environment on both machines, although not necessarily at the same time. I had one of these designated computer licenses, and thanks to Mathworks' provident care, I was able to deactivate and reactivate them over the web when switching between computers. So I changed the designated computer a few times between those machines. Today I wanted to change again, but Mathworks wouldn't let me:

"No more machine transfers available for this license."

WTF?

OK, you're forcing me to port even my old scripts to python. Pity you. I spent already too much time struggling with licensing issues - time which I would much more like to spend on research. Goodbye Matlab.

4 Kommentare:

Dimaz Julio hat gesagt…

here reference about using matlab :
http://repository.gunadarma.ac.id/bitstream/123456789/1229/1/50407547.pdf

mschmuker hat gesagt…

Thanks for the link, it's a pity I don't understand Indonesian... but the gait recognition stuff looks interesting :)

Unknown hat gesagt…

Hi!

I happened to encounter the same issue :( Any suggestion on how to bypass this problem? I asked the Mathworks forum and got the answer to wait the next redesignation window to occur. Geez I wonder how long I need to wait.

mschmuker hat gesagt…

Feisal, I eventually switched to python... This matlab licensing stuff really freaked me out and stole so much time from my research that it was well worth investing in learning python. No more matlab issues for me :)