Both spmd and parfor require a matlabpool to be open to send their work to each worker in the pool. You can create the matlabpool on your client using the 'matlabpool' function, which creates an interactive matlabpool tied to the lifetime of your MATLAB session.
If however you wish to run your code in the background, or submit it to a cluster to run later, you create a communicating job of type 'Pool'. This creates a job that starts a matlabpool on the cluster, using one of the workers as the 'client' and the remaining workers to form the matlabpool.
