There’s a new project for coordinating large scale psychophysics and neurophysiology in Matlab called Snow Dots. It uses PsychToolbox as a presentation layer and builds a framework around it to automate experimental flow, do GUIs, move data around, etc. It’s a little too Java-ish for my tastes (I’m a lightweight, convention over configuration kind of guy) but there’s some neat ideas in there. AFAIU, there’s a layer for Matlab instances to communicate with each other over IP using objects serialized using the “save” command. Seems like a pretty good way of getting around Matlab’s lack of threads, which is painful when you have to do a lot of things simultaneously (like collect eye tracker data, stream spikes, present an experiment, save events, what have you). Our own system uses MachIPC to communicate b/w Matlab instances but that’s OS X only (sadness).