The tendency to write Matlab that's several orders of magnitude slower than equivalent Fortran isn't the only reason to try to keep it off HPC systems. There are crazy (and inconsistent) licensing conditions applying to running on clusters for one.
Re:GNU Octave
by CamperBob2 on Saturday November 19, 2016 @11:06PM
(#12997217)
Matlab has some optional distributed features. You can farm it out to an EC2 instance among other things.
Octave can do this too [1,2]. The 'parallel' package is quite easy to set up and integrate. 'mpi' doesn't work with new octave versions (yet?).
[1] http://octave.sourceforge.net/mpi/ [2] http://octave.sourceforge.net/parallel/
Bear in mind that you'd have to rewrite both Matlab and GNU Octave if you need to run your simulations on a super computer.
I remember back when I was a first year I was waist-deep in some Matlab when one of the guys at our high-performance computing center jested that if I wrote a for-loop I may just as well run around the building for each iteration and do the calculation with pen and paper. (context: members of the same computer club)