How do I configure a MATLAB worker in a cluster to have the security setting of a user who submits the job?

I am trying to run a parallel MATLAB job on a cluster. The parallel code writes the results to a folder which requires specific group/user permissions.

When I run code on the workers running locally on my machine, I am able to read or write to/from the folder without any issues since I am a user who has permission to do that folder. However, when I submit the code to the cluster, the workers can not access the folder.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

By default, on Windows the workers run as a local system user, and on Linux and Mac OS X as root users. These users might have limited access to certain directories and network mounted drives. To change this setting you will need to modify the MDCE_USER property in mdce_def.bat file. You will need to set this property to a user who has read and write permissions to the group folder.

You will need to restart the MDCE daemon for the changes to take effect by executing the following commands:

 mdce stop
 mdce uninstall
 mdce install
 mdce start

Additionally, starting with MATLAB R2010b MATLAB Distributed Computing Server allows for a finer level of job security control, where each parallel job can be run as the user who submitted it to the cluster. To enable this, set the SECURITY_LEVEL to 3 in the mdce_def file. For more information on setting the job security level in MATLAB Distributed Computing Server please refer to the following documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2020a/matlab-parallel-server/set-matlab-job-scheduler-cluster-security.html