You can make sure to run MATLAB without parallelization, e.g. by starting with the -singleCompThread option to turn off parallelization. MATLAB's linear algebra library is multithreaded by default.
http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/maxnumcompthreads.html Julia's linear algebra routines are not parallelized by default, so this ensures a fair comparison. Thanks, Jiahao Chen, PhD Staff Research Scientist MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
