Unfortunately, there's no API to modify the parallel preferences. I think you have essentially two options here, and these are:
- Turn off auto-opening pools in the parallel preferences UI. Then you have essentially the same situation as existed in R2013a.
- Use the optional "number of workers" argument in your PARFOR loop - see the documentation for more.
As an example of the second approach, you could do something like this
if wantToGoParallel
M = Inf;
else
M = 0;
end
parfor (idx = 1:N, M)
doStuff(...);
end
