Comsol is specifically designed to easily couple transport phenomena, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as well as mass and energy transport to chemical-reaction kinetics and process-related modelling. Licensed Modules include: MultiPhysics, Chemical Engineering, Acoustics, Structural Mechanics, Script.

Comsol related:

Comsol Command Line Parameters

>module load comsol >comsol -h

See -3drend sw parameter for fixing display issues

How do I run Comsol as an interactive threaded job?

> module load comsol/5.0

> salloc -N 1 -c 8 -p interactive

> srun --pty --x11=first comsol

How do I run Comsol as a mpi parallel job?
Start Comsol as above, but add the command line options as follows:

-bash-3.2$ srun ... comsol -np 8 -mpmode owner

Then in the gui setup for Solver parameters, change the default Solver to the Parallel Direct Solver(Pardiso) and rerun your model.

To do the same task but on an node with exclusive access use the --exclusive option, but note that the request may take some time to be granted depending of loads.

The comsol help button doesn't work, how do I find the documentation?
The compute nodes do not have browsers installed. Firefox is available on the headnode of the cluster instead. The install tree for Comsol contains html docs and some pdfs as well.

$ ls /opt/comsol35a/doc/
aco browser chem multiphysics plain sme

For example to view the html chem docs:
$ firefox file:///opt/comsol35a/doc/chem/index.htm

Sometimes you may find that your comsol efforts no longer work as they may have in the past; resulting in java errors of several types. These errors will be noted in your log file. What can one do to get around this?

Close any open Comsol sessions, and remove your .comsol directory located in your home directory.
> cd

Make a backup and then delete everything in .comsol directory.

> mv .comsol .comsol.backup
> rm -rf .comsol/

> mkdir .comsol

> ln -s /cluster/shared/your_utln/.comsol ./.comsol

This soft link will redirect comsol temp structures to your dir. in /cluster/shared/ . There is no disk quota on this filesystem.

Restart comsol and a new set of structures will be created. If you have requested Research Storage, you may use that for a longer term solution.

Note: You only need to do this once.

How do I run comsol in batch mode?

> module load comsol

To run Comsol's tube1b.mph example:

> sbatch ...options.... --wrap="comsol batch -inputfile tube1b.mph -outputfile tube1b-output.mph"

The solution will update a new version of the .mph file as output. You can read the output file into Comsol later for further post processing. There will be 3 output files and a directory created with name tube1b_files containing graphics and other files produced from the batch job.

Note, you may then log off while your job runs. YOu will be notified by email when the job is done.

How do I run comsol gui interface with software rendering?

Use the Comsol commandline option: -3drend sw

> srun --pty --x11=first -p interactive comsol -3drend sw

This may solve display issues you might have do to your xserver.