Have you looked at using the Parallel Computing Toolbox? The parfor and spmd constructs are specifically written to allow code to be distributed and parallelized. These commands will work with your local machine (8 workers), a jobmanager cluster (developed by MathWorks) or certain other commercial / open source clusters. You can also use the compiler for some things, as well.
There are some limitations on the functionality, but you might want to check out the documentation and see if it can solve your problem more quickly. I'm also assuming you have the license, as well.
