matlab/octave performance hit

[Victor Zhorin]

Hello,

We tried to see whether we could make existing matlab code to run using octave on parallel cluster.
Unfortunately we found that performance hit is too strong.

It seems that slowness is most likely due to some instrinsic system/octave  issues.

Here is a quick example:

tic; test = 1:200; nc = cumsum(test);toc

octave (linux based box, latest release compiled)
Elapsed time is 0.023521 seconds.
matlab (mac, powerpc)
Elapsed time is 0.000064 seconds.
octave (same mac, latest binary package for Mac X installed as-is)
Elapsed time is 0.050179 seconds.

That's a very significant difference in performing the most basic operations.
Is there a way we can speed it up or could we possibly miss something in installation?

Thank you.

Victor V. Zhorin
University of Chicago
Computational Institute