Support Issues for MATLAB

Disclaimer - This report contains a combination of fact, observation, and opinion. It is our best understanding of the situation under our particular circumstances, and is not guaranteed to be correct or to apply to conditions other than those under which the evaluation was made. It is for the use of the Fermilab / HEP community only.

Maturity and Completeness

There are a number of references on Mathworks' WWW pages. They claim to have around 400,000 users worldwide. I have asked for HEP references (users at SLAC, BNL, LANL, etc.) and am waiting.

 

The product has been around for ~15 years. Current release is 5.2.  

There is a freeware version, called Octave. It is unclear whether this will really overtake MATLAB, though. The fact that the Octave graphics are still very crude indicates that not a lot of work is being applied to areas we consider important.

 

Who supports users

There are e-mail and phone hotlines for support questions. A local base of knowledge could easily bedeveloped to help with FAQ and other straightforward questions. The newsgroup is busy, with about 800 articles posted in the last two - three weeks.

 

 Anyone at the site would be able to contact the hotline

 

HEP usage is unknown. The newsgroup is busy, and the q & a in there look healthy, ranging from beginner-level inquiries to refinements of graphics output. There seem to be plenty of users.

 

It is available and expensive (about $500/person/2-day course). From my experience the product is pretty easy to get started with using the doc.

 

There is such a thing, but it isn't yet priced.

 

The product seems very easy to use. I would think though that a local working group or mailing list would be helpful, as we write our data interface modules and other HEP-specific functions. The volume of licenses that we will require some attention, as well as coordination with the license server people (fnalu-admin).

 

The helpwin facility and www-based documentation are outstanding. Response to technical questions from the hotline has been very good. The books and helpwin are full of examples. Getting started with the product is very easy.

 

Yes - see above

 

Not required, but recommended. Workarounds exist for the case where peons do the installation. UPS/UPD tailoring would be pretty easy.

 

Licensing

Flexlm, floating seats exist for Un*x and NT (these are separate). However, any of our collaborators can use licenses off of our server. In addition, there is another breakdown of the Unix licenses into interactive (programmer's) and batch licenses.

 

The cost is very high. They are quoting ~$3000 per floating Unix seat per year, with 20% discounts for large volumes.

 

Maintenance

Who provides it and how much:

I would envision a pool of local knowledge (mailing lists, module repository) to supplement the hotline. AS a commercial, it would not be "maintained" by fixing the code, but by feeding questions/problems back to MathWorks and then updating the local installations. If the company folds we could go to Octave.

 

We didn't encountered any bugs. The support line was responsive in the case of our two questions.

 

Probably not - just relaying bugs and fixes.

 

Two ways to go. We can by a four year service agreement, in which case we pay for 4 years of upgrades/hotline/etc. for 20% of our purchase price. This includes perpetual licenses. Or, we can renew one year at a time, for 20% of the current price. In this case the license must be renewed each year.

 

Probably N/A.

 

It is not available.

 

Maintenance Infrastructure

Standard build kits for Unix and Install Shield kits for Win32. Distributed on CD, we could distribute via ZIP files/upd kits probably.

 

 Kits exist for all of our platforms.

 

N/A

 

I can see us sharing modules and controlling those however we choose. But as far as changing the distribution, it will not occur.

 

N/A

 

 No such restrictions.

 

Yes - release notes are provided.

 

Maturity and Completeness

All of this exists. THere is a newsgroup where users share ideas and code. The Mathworks WWW pages are very complete, with FAQ's and the like.

 

 Yes. Version 5.2 is primarily an upgrade.

 

Yes. Much work is going into Win32 versions.

 

Modularity:

The only big deficiency I see is possibly with the data management. It is unclear how this will behave when fed a 2GB ntuple. Some code to help manage such data may have to be written. The API is excellent and well-documented. CD (PAT, I guess) would probably be able to handle the support with existing manpower. This would include getting distribution and licenses set up, upd'ifying the product, and helping the experimentors get going with their data interface modules. Also preferable would be management of local module base and mailing list. I see maintenence of this product requiring less work than a HEP-ware product.

 

I didn't actually do it, but I think such a thing could be done without much problem. For example, it would seem to be straightforward to replace (actually override) the plotting with OpenInventor graphics, for example.

 

N/A

 

N/A

 

??

 

This package is self-contained.

 

Portability

All runii platforms are maintained. We could share licenses between Un*X platforms.

 

 N/A

 

 

 Works on 64-bit platforms.

 

There don't seem to be

 

 

Standards:

 

 N/A

 

N/A

 

N/A

 

N/A

 

Reliability and Security:

None

 

I wasn't able to crash it on NT. There are reports of a crash on the newsgroup, with shat sounded like a typical seg fault.

 

No government regulations. Foreign collaborators could probably make use of our licenses, but may cost more.

 

 

Application specific:

Yes. All work in MATLAB eminates for double precision arrays. Interfaces will have to be written from experiments' data models.

 

 

A problem - some cose will have to be written to handle runII sized files.