Cannot find a license for distrib_co​mputing_to​olbox

Dear Team,

Currently i'm using MATLAB tool for Monte Carlo simulation of about 500 run. During the contious simulation, i got the error message as shown below and simulation got stopped.

Error Message:

License checkout failed. License Manager Error -5. Cannot find a license for Distrib_Computing_Toolbox.

Troubleshoot this issue by visiting: http://www.mathworks.com/support/lme/R2017b/5

Diagnostic Information: Feature: Distrib_Computing_Toolbox

License path: /share/fe00fx11/matlab/network-apac.lic:/share/fe00fx11/matlab/network.lic:/home/pry6cob/.matlab/R2017b_licenses:/share/fe00fx11/matlab/r2017b/licenses/license.dat:/share/fe00fx11/matlab/r2017b/licenses/network.lic

Error using distcompserialize64. Unable to checkout a license for the Parallel Computing Toolbox. Error in parallel.internal.pool.serialize (line 8). serialized = distcompserialize64(data);

Error in remoteParallelFunction (line 65). out = parallel.internal.pool.serialize(errToSerialize);

I got the same error message even if i reduced to 200 runs. I have the permanent license for my user id from my company. but still i got this error.

Now i need your expertise support to fix the issue .

Kindly let me know for further information if any.

Regards,

Parthiban. R

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Your session is configured so that your default parallel pool is on a remote system, but you do not have (an available) license for the Distributed Computing Toolbox.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/parallel-computing/discover-clusters-and-use-cluster-profiles.html

You can control the default cluster by looking just left of Add-Ons in the main toolbar for 'Parallel' and select "Create and Manage Clusters".

If you intend to run on your own machine instead of remotely, select the cluster named 'local'.

If you run locally, you do not need a Distributed Computing Toolbox license.

[Parthiban Rayappan]

Hello Mr. Walter,

Thanks for your quick support.

Actually i need to run the simulation in HPC system with my user login. In this case which parallel cluster do i need to select ?

I have "local & MATLAB parallel cloud" as option where i can able to select 16 parallel processing in local & only 1 in MATLAB paralle cloud option.

So i'm bit confused now, which one i need to select & what other changes to be done for license issue with HPC system.

Could you kindly provide some more information on the same ?

Hint:

I'm using "submatlab -n 16 -V r2017b -e [e-mail] -r 100 -m 5G AUFTRAG_V2.m" command to run the simulation in HPC system.

[Walter Roberson]

Unfortunately submatlab appears to be a local function at your location, so I do not know what it is doing. It might possibly be submitting a batch job, or queuing a job for remote execution.

I have not used or configured a cluster myself, so I am not clear as to where the MDCS license needs to reside.

What I can say from the error number is that when MATLAB is looking at your licenses, incuding your network licenses, it is not finding a MDCS license at all. If there were a license but the license was "full", there would be a different error message. If there were a license that it could find but you were not on the list of permitted users, there would be a different error message.

Possibilities include:

• your organization might just not have licensed the product (seems unlikely)
• the license might have expired (plausible)
• your list of license sources might happen to miss out the source that has the license
• the license manager with the appropriate license might be unreachable due to firewall
• the license manager with the appropriate license might be down

The cases of firewall or down normally have their own error messages, but when there are multiple license sources listed (as is the case for you), MATLAB might just continue on. It is quite common for people to have license sources configured that refer to hosts that are no longer acting as servers, so if one license source can be reached but not a different one, the unreachable one might not be mentioned.

[Parthiban Rayappan]

Thanks for your feedback and information.

I will share this information to our company license & HPC team for further support.

I will come back to you with open points after checking internally if any.

Thanks

[Parthiban Rayappan]

Hello Mr. Walter,

Thanks for your support.

I had a internal check with out license team and got below feedback,

" Based on internal check, we found that the issue might be in "Distrib_Computing_Toolbox license" in this case what would be the reason for reffering MDCS license ? MDCS license is needed for my simulation job and always ? "

so could you kindly provide some more information on the same ?

Hint:

Our company has valid licesne for MATLAB and distributing tool box.

[Walter Roberson]

Unfortunately I accidentally misled you before.

Distrib_Computing_Toolbox is the license key for Parallel Computing Toolbox, https://www.mathworks.com/products/parallel-computing.html which is the product that provides for local use of parallel workers, and for GPU use, but is not the same as MCDS that I mentioned.

MDCS was MATLAB Distributed Computing Server, which is newly renamed to Parallel Server Toolbox as of R2019a https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab-parallel-server/release-notes.html

However, when I look more carefully at the product key and the product name, it is the Parallel Computing Toolbox license that it is unable to find. You as a user would need to have access to that toolbox to use local workers. If I recall correctly, for at least some means of accessing HPC servers, you as a user would need to have access to the Parallel Computing Toolbox in order to be able to submit jobs to the HPC server.

I am not certain that having access to a Parallel Computing Toolbox license is always necessary to use an HPC server. It is necessary to use MATLAB's batch or parfor or spmd or parfeval or parfevalOnAll and have the job automatically submitted to an HPC server in a way that communicates with your session. However, I am not sure if there are alternatives.

If you are using the facilities of the Parallel Computing Tooblox to run jobs on a HPC, then the HPC would need a license for the computing server, current product name Parallel Server, but Distributed Computing Server in your release. Unfortunately I do not have the information about which key that is in the license file. Your IT people might want to compare license files to the tables I have put together in https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/449314-how-do-features-from-license-correspond-to-names-from-ver