Aqua Connect enables them to serve MATLAB power to their scientists for use on both Mac and Windows platforms

The Aarhus University Hospital Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) needed a way to increase the amount of MATLAB computations being done at a time without having to add extra machines. Aqua Connect solved their needs to distribute MATLAB computation work areas to more users from a centralized server and still be able to use the power of the MATLAB Xserve Farm, not to mention still be within licensing rules.

Aqua Connect is running on a beefed up standalone server. It is an 8 Core Intel Nehalem Xserve with a minimum of 24 GB of RAM. Users connect to ACRDS using an existing OpenLDAP database hosted on a Sun Solaris setup. Their user group consists of student, doctors, scientists and professors, all who are studying the human brain in some way. On the Mac side, users use the RDP protocol and connect via CoRD or RDC for Mac. On the Windows side, they use RDC for Windows or other RDP-based client software.

They tried an alternative program that had multiple problems working with foreign LDAP authorization. Attempts to contact their support team were met without success.

Aarhus University Hospital hoped to add on more Xserves in the near future so they could have many more MATLAB computations running at the same time. They look forward to possibly distributing a few clients out on another box or two, due to some computations that may take more than 14 days to complete. Now that they have the power of a typical high-powered terminal server-like application in a very cross-platform University/Hospital, they felt that they are more able to distribute odd scientific options to their clients and users.

"More power for brains!"

- Stephan Pindstrup