Dragonfly: A multi-platform parallel toolbox for MATLAB/Octave

In this paper, we present Dragonfly, a free open-source software toolkit that allows creating a parallel collaboration environment between MATLAB and/or Octave instances, allowing us to have a robust system, which is flexible, transparent and interoperable. Dragonfly can be used under multi-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac) and multi-environment configurations (e.g., MATLAB and/or Octave instances). To distribute the workload, it has a flexible system, where programmers can select the computational resources, create clusters and assign weights to balance properly tasks across the distributed environment (MATLAB and Octave instances machines) with different computational power. These functionalities allow obtaining good performance metrics such as: execution time, scalability and efficiency. Finally, this tool has been tested on different computer systems from standard commodity environments to medium size clusters using a set of applications from different scientific fields. This widespread in-field validation allowed showing good performances not only in speedup but also in efficiency using Dragonfly. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.