COMSOL Multiphysics® is a general-purpose simulation software for modeling designs, devices, and processes in all fields of engineering, manufacturing, and scientific research. In addition to using multiphysics modeling for your own projects, you can also turn your models into simulation applications and digital twins for use by other design teams, manufacturing departments, test labs, customers, and more.
The platform product can be used on its own or expanded with functionality from any combination of add-on modules for simulating electromagnetics, structural mechanics, acoustics, fluid flow, heat transfer, and chemical engineering.
¶ Advice
COMSOL is a software that is constantly in high demand at ODU. Due to the limitation of the number of COMSOL licenses, we strongly advise you to use COMSOL judiciously. Do not let COMSOL GUI open & idle overnight, and close the program as soon as you are done with your work. Do not run more than one GUI so that there are licenses available for others to use.
COMSOL is a graphical program, therefore it is best to run within the remote desktop (RDP) interface. Please refer to our "Connecting to RDP documentation" to access HPC via RDP.
COMSOL can be used on either the Turing or Wahab clusters. We advise you to run COMSOL on Turing cluster for better compatibility with the operating system. This article will focus on the usage of COMSOL on Turing.
We have number of COMSOL launchers available system-wide on Turing. These are scripts that can be run directly from the terminal, and they will allocate the necessary compute node in which to run the COMSOL program:
comsol-51: Starts COMSOL 5.1 GUI -- This is the recommended program
comsol-51-ckl: Starts COMSOL 5.1 GUI with the classr kit license (see below). Only use this program when you are teaching or learning or doing class assignments. This software is not valid for use with research projects.
These commands have been made available without having to load any module on Turing.
The Comsol software is strictly limited to two types of licenses. You can check the status of the Comsol license using the following commands. Please ensure you load the Comsol module prior to to running these.
¶ License Restrictions
COMSOL usage is subject to the license restrictions. There are two types of licenses avaiable for ODU community:
- the research license (total 2 licenses)
- the class kit license (CKL, total 25 licenses)
You are personally responsible to use the right type of license for your intended activity. In particular, the you are not allowed to use the CKL software for research purposes.
There are some useful license tools inside the comsol module:
enable_lmod
module load comsol
These tools can report how many licenses have been checked out for each components in COMSOL, so you can be sure that you have the license needed to run your particular toolbox / component. Run these tools from the UNIX shell from the login or compute node.
check_license check_license_ckl