Every day, over 5000 MathWorkers start their work day thinking ‘How can I contribute to the acceleration of engineering and science today?’  It’s a wonderful thing to be part of and the 18 months that I’ve been here have been some of the most fun and exciting of my ~20 year career.  I’m not the only one who feels this way, MathWorks was recently ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 20 companies in Technology and Information in the US for example.  MathWorks are always hiring so do consider joining us if you are planning your next adventure.

R2022a – More updates than any other release

One of the company’s activities is a new release of MATLAB, Simulink and over 100 toolboxes and other products every 6 months.  It’s a huge amount of work and in a recent meeting I overheard someone casually mention that R2022a was MathWorks biggest release ever.  No one was making a big deal out of this though, the team was simply getting on with the task of producing the next release, R2022b.  My colleagues at MathWorks are a modest bunch!

R2022a has more new features and updates than any previous release in MathWorks 37 year history: Over 4000 by one of our internal measures.

This includes 5 new products:

• Bluetooth Toolbox– Simulate, analyze, and test Bluetooth communications systems
• DSP HDL Toolbox– Design digital signal processing applications for FPGAs, ASICs, and SoCs
• Industrial Communication Toolbox– Exchange data over OPC UA, Modbus, MQTT, and other industrial protocols
• RoadRunner Scenario– Create and play back scenarios for automated driving simulation
• Wireless Testbench– Explore and test wireless reference applications in real time on SDR hardware

and major updates to 10 products which saw new Artificial Intelligence (AI) based workflows being added to Signal Processing Toolbox and the ability to publish MATLAB functions as Docker microservices via MATLAB Compiler SDK  among many other things.

Signal Analyzer app, which received several updates in R2022a

Alongside these new products and major updates there were hundreds of updates around the rest of the MATLAB and Simulink ecosystem. If you’ve never done so before, I encourage you to take a look at the release highlights and detailed release notes in areas that you are interested in.

Not so minor ‘Minor updates’

Sometimes I find that MathWorks doesn’t consider a feature to be major when users might completely disagree.  For example, back when R2020b was released and I was a user rather than an employee, Second Order Cone Programming was a big deal in my life.  The release of the coneprog function in was of huge importance to me but it didn’t even make the release highlights!  A life-changing function (for me at least) was just quietly made available and discussed deep in the detailed release notes.

R2022a is no different. Features that are a big deal to me but didn’t make it to the release highlights include things like new tiebreaking control methods in the round function, massive performance improvements to the lasso and lassoglm functions and multifactor authentication support for the Generic Scheduler Interface in Parallel Computing Toolbox.  That last one might sound rather esoteric but it will be game changing for at least one set of academic users I’ve been talking with.

Mike, When I’ve asked about this my HPC sysadmins claim this is impossible because we have two factor authentication. Is this true? Would be game changing to be able to do this.

— Del Bohnenstiehl (@drbohnen) December 2, 2021

R2022a highlights from other users

It is illuminating to read what other users focus on when a new release comes around.  Here are a few other perspectives:

• University of Manchester’s Nick Higham discusses R2022a features he’s particularly interested in.
• MathWorker Lucas Garcia lists his favourite features in R2022a
• Fellow MathWorks bloggers, Steve Eddins and Guy Rouleau, took a look MATLAB R2022a and Simulink R2022a respectively back in March, just after they were released

Progress marches on – R2022b pre-release available now

Just because we’ve produced the biggest release in our history doesn’t mean we get to sit around congratulating ourselves for very long.  Work on R2022b was already in progress when R2022a was released and anyone with a valid MATLAB license can start to play with some of the fruits of this labour right now via the R2022b pre-release.

Download it, play with it, try to break it and send us feedback before the final release drops in September. There’s some really exciting stuff coming that I’m really looking forward to discussing with you all.