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You task is still engineering, There doesn't seem anything scientific here.
Less you know, easier is to bring in your skills. Leave the scientific part to your colleagues and focus on your skills alone. Do not mix and match.
Did you join Mathworks ?
Beyond scalability, I think the biggest things you could bring to the scientists here would be test driven development and logs. You won't become a Matlab expert on a deadline and they may not actually be Matlab experts either. Tests and visibility into actual behavior are everything here since they don't even seem to have a spec, just a prototype.
Additionally, its a pretty safe assumption that any given piece of scientific code has never been profiled for performance. There are probably numerous opportunities to improve performance on a single host through refactoring before you need to think about scaling.