Worked because we followed the directions
We tested MATLAB on EC successfully, using our lab's Standalone Named User license.
The directions from Mathworks "MATLAB on EC2 Instructions" are long and detailed, but worked, except for one or two points. We needed to restart nxserver on the server before we were able to connect with the client. Do that with this command via SSH:
$ sudo /usr/lib/nx/nxserver --restart
After that, we connected using the OpenNX client (Mac OS X). Another problem, the .pem key file imported by the OpenNX client had problems with spaces/extra carriage returns introduced by cut-and-paste (you can avoid that problem by generating the key pair on your local machine and uploading the public key to AWS).
Matlab cannot be launched from SSH, which is a shame (it seems like the GUI is needed to do the authentication part). Fixing this would be a very welcome improvement.
Our license did not include the parallel processing toolbox, which means we could not do real work. We'd have to upgrade the license to do anything useful.
On EC, we used c4.xlarge and t2.medium instances. We tried the 36-core c4.8xlarge, but unfortunately the instance never launched. MATLAB on EC2 cannot be used at the AWS's free tier.
"Matlab cannot be launched from SSH, which is a shame (it seems like the GUI is needed to do the authentication part). Fixing this would be a very welcome improvement." - Is this still the case do you know? Tom