In R2010b, your options are to use either parfor or spmd. (In R2013b and later, there's parfeval which gives more flexibility, but is a little more difficult to use). With either parfor or spmd, you will need to arrange so that your two functions can make a partial attempt at a solution, and then continue - this is because you need to check whether either has completed yet. This will necessarily make things less efficient. You might do something like this:
parpool(2);
spmd
done = false;
state = []; % state used by Function_I or Function_II
while ~done
% Run Function_I/Function_II for a while
if labindex == 1
[state, gotSolution] = Function_I(state);
elseif labindex == 2
[state, gotSolution] = Function_II(state);
end
% Check to see if either has completed using GOP which
% combines the results of 'gotSolution' from each lab
done = gop(@any, gotSolution);
end
end
% access solution in 'state'
In R2013b and later, you could simply use parfeval to invoke Function_I / Function_II and then use fetchNext to work out when one of them has completed, a bit like this:
parpool(2);
f1 = parfeval(@Function_I, 1);
f2 = parfeval(@Function_II, 1);
% fetchNext waits for one of the functions to complete,
% and also gets the result
[idx, result] = fetchNext([f1, f2]);
% We're done, so we can cancel f1 and f2 (one will actually already be complete)
cancel([f1, f2]);
