Since 2014, the limit of 12 workers using the matlab parallel computing toolbox has been lifted. Today, I was able to get this to work. There's a trick.

Usually, when you start up matlab and run a parallel thing like 'parfor', it just uses a default profile 'local' which limits you to 12 workers. You can try to ask for more by doing 'parpool(40)' for 40 workers, but it will tell you that NumWorkers = 12 and you're out of luck. So instead:

myCluster = parcluster('local')

myCluster.NumWorkers = 40;

saveProfile(myCluster);

parpool('myCluster', 40)

It seems that it needs the max # of workers and the requested number of workers to be 40 to use 40, otherwise you'll just get 12 (as of matlab 2016a).