MATLAB Menagerie

There are several MATLAB-related items to post, but individually they don’t amount to much, so I’ll just put them all together.

Outside of MATLAB Central, there are a lot of places to find useful MATLAB code and commentary. In particular, some labs have excellently curated MATLAB toolboxes and are willing to share with their friends. So ask around. No need to reinvent the wheel.

As far as what’s publicly available, I’ve stumbled across a couple that have been handy. Blogger Stinkpot writes very brief notes on MATLAB sporadically. Items include Moving the X-axis to the top of a plot and Inserting a MATLAB matrix in to LaTeX.

Peter Acklam offers a nicely organized list of MATLAB utilities. Although some of the functions are quite old and are now included in MATLAB natively (e.g. the Kronecker tensor product), others are fairly unique and may be useful to you. There are also somewhat obscure things like trigonometric functions using gradians (e.g. cosgrad).

Xcorr has had a couple of excellent posts recently on some perhaps obscure MATLAB functions. There is an excellent explanation and demo for each function. Highly recommended. Xcorr’s coverage of memmapfile and bsxfun.

Finally, you might be interested in GPU computing with MATLAB. AccelerEyes‘ Libjacket is finally 1.0 (link). This uses NVIDIA hardware to accelerate MATLAB computations. The graph at the top of this post compares the performance of their software running on an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 to an alternative, CPU-based acceleration technology (Intel’s Math Kernel Library). Academic research has found similar advantages (link).