Progress bar with parfor and nohup

I'd like to monitor the progress of a script making use of parfor. Unfortunately, since it requires a large amount of computational power and time, I have to launch it on a remote multiprocessor computer, using nohup.

As first attempt, I used fprintf in order to have an output from each of the parallel instances, i.e.

parfor i = 1:N
    fprintf('Computing istance %i out of %i\n', i, N)
    % Other code
end

and counting the occurences of the word "instance" in the nohup output file, using grep. However, since N is in the order of some hundreds of millions, the output file become huge and so I'd like to avoid it.

Then, I start trying some parfor progress bar I can find on MATLAB Central. However, most of them are made to use a graphic output and the few other ones have some drawbacks if used togheter with nohup (e.g. in the output file I found every single update of the progress bar, so again the output file will be huge).

How can I effectively monitor a parfor, while using nohup?

Answer 1

[Edric Ellis]

A really simple approach would be just to print out every 1000 iterations. In other words

parfor i = 1:N
    if mod(i, 1000) == 0
        fprintf('Computing istance %i out of %i\n', i, N);
    end
    % Other code
end