COMSOL Multiphysics offers an extensive interface to MATLAB and its toolboxes for a large variety of programming, preprocessing, and postprocessing possibilities. The packages are cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix). The following is an overview of the license types for COMSOL Multiphysics: Named Single User License (NSL) The COMSOL Multiphysics software may be installed and operated on up to four (4) individual computers, provided it is only accessible to, and operated by, a single licensed user designated by us as the Named User for that license. COMSOL Multiphysics 5.0 but also to any of the add-on products. Windows, Mac, or Linux. A COMSOL model file saved on one platform can be opened on another.
COMSOL Multiphysics is a finite element analysis, solver and Simulation software / FEA Software package for various physics and engineering applications, especially coupled phenomena, or multiphysics. COMSOL Multiphysics also offers an extensive interface to MATLAB and its toolboxes for a large variety of programming, preprocessing and postprocessing possibilities. The packages are cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). In addition to conventional physics-based user interfaces, COMSOL Multiphysics also allows for entering coupled systems of partial differential equations (PDEs). The PDEs can be entered directly or using the so-called weak form (see finite element method for a description of weak formulation). An early version (before 2005) of COMSOL Multiphysics was called FEMLAB.
ToolBoxes: SERIAL, CHEMCKL, COMSOLCKL, LLMATLABCKL, NONLINEARSTRUCTMATERIALSCKL, RFCKL, STRUCTURALMECHANICSCKL, CADIMPORTCKL, HEATTRANSFERCKL, MEMSCKL, COMSOLGUICKL, CADREADERCKL
Installation of COMSOL Multiphysics on a Windows PC
- Download COMSOL 5.5 from this link, and connect to the engineering VPN.
- Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the COMSOL 5.5 file.
- Make sure you have an extraction utility like 7-Zip installed.
- Right click on the file, select ‘7-Zip’, and then select ‘Extract Here’.
- 7-Zip will output the progress on your extraction, and once done the file will be in the same directory.
- Navigate to the extracted file, then right click on ‘setup.exe’ and select ‘Run as administrator’.
- The COMSOL 5.5 installer will open up, select your language and click ‘Next’.
- Select ‘New COMSOL 5.5 Installation’.
- Accept the license agreement.
Change License Format to <port number>@<host name>
Enter for the Port number: 1718
Enter for the Hostname: comsol.engr.ucr.edu
then click Next. - Check to make sure all settings are correct and continue to click Next.
- Once you are ready, click Install, which will proceed through the installation.
- Once the installation is finished, you can close the installer. Note: Installation of COMSOL Updates may be prompted, go ahead and install them.
- To run COMSOL, make sure you are connected to engineering VPN and then go to the Start Menu and run COMSOL Multiphysics (Class License Kit).
NOTE: You can download the previous versions if needed.
Platform:All PlatformsVersions:All versions
Problem Description
This solution describes how COMSOL takes advantage of multicore computers.
Solution
COMSOL supports two mutual modes of parallel operation: shared-memory parallelism and distributed-memory parallelism (cluster support). Shared-memory parallelism is supported with all COMSOL license types, while distributed-memory parallelism requires a floating network license. Using shared-memory parallelism is possible to utilize all CPU sockets on a computer, but for computers with multiple sockets, it can sometimes be advantageous with a floating network license to utilize the computer's full capacity; for further information, please see Hybrid Computing: Advantages of Shared and Distributed Memory Combined. This solution is dedicated to shared-memory parallel operations. For distributed-memory parallel operations, see Solution 1001.
Shared-memory processing, or multithreading is important for the performance of COMSOL computations. Some terms that are frequently used in when describing multithreading are
- Core: A physical processor core used in shared-memory parallelism by a computational node with multiple processors.
- Speedup: is how many times faster a job runs on N cores compared to 1 core, on a specific compute node. The speedup depends both on the problem type, the hardware used, and hardware drivers used.
Windows
On Windows platforms, the default number of processor cores used by COMSOL is the total number of available physical cores. For example, if you have a 2 x dual core machine, 4 cores will be used in parallel by a COMSOL Multiphysics process by default.
If you want COMSOL to leave out one or more processor cores you can manually set the number of cores used for a job, you can change the default behavior by starting the COMSOL Desktop and setting the Number of processors option on the Multicore and Cluster Computing section in the Preferences menu.
Alternatively, create a new shortcut on your Desktop to the COMSOL executable and modify it to set the desired number of threads.
- Create a new shortcut on the Desktop.
- Right-click the shortcut and select Properties.
- Change the Target field to
'C:Program FilesCOMSOLCOMSOL55Multiphysicsbinwin64comsol.exe' -np 2
if you want COMSOL to use only 2 cores.
Mac OS X
On Mac OS X, controlling the number of processor cores used by COMSOL is only possible when launching COMSOL from the Terminal. The default behavior is to use all available physical processor cores for the COMSOL Multiphysics application. You can find how many processor cores you have in the System Profiler application, or by using the command sysctl hw.ncpu. You can override the default behavior by using the command line switches. For example, start by the command
/Applications/COMSOL55/Multiphysics/bin/comsol -np 2.
/Applications/COMSOL55/Multiphysics/bin/comsol -np 2.
Linux
The number of cores available to a COMSOL process in parallel can be displayed on some systems by the command
more /proc/cpuinfo | grep proc
more /proc/cpuinfo | grep proc
Note that if you have hyperthreading activated you need to divide the cores count reported by the above command by relevant hyperthreading factor (2) to get the physical core count. COMSOL does not benefit from hyperthreading; if COMSOL is started with more threads than there are physical CPU cores, performance will decrease.
On Linux the default behavior is to use all available physical cores for the COMSOL Multiphysics application. You can override the default behavior by using the command line switches. For example, start by the command comsol -np 2.
![Comsol Comsol](/uploads/1/1/8/9/118960628/168155479.jpg)
Hyperthreading
COMSOL does currently not benefit from hyperthreading. COMSOL will use only as many threads as there are physical CPU cores on the system. The result is that if hyperthreading is active, the Windows Task Manager will show at most 50% CPU utilization for the COMSOL process. This is expected and not an indication that CPU utilization is too low. It is recommended to have hyperthreading enabled such that other applications running simultaneously can take advantage of it.
The -mpmode option
The values 'turnaround' and 'throughput' for -mpmode correlate directly with the OpenMP runtime settings for the KMPLIBRARY environment variable. The -mpmode option overwrites the system settings (if KMPLIBRARY is not set). For more information on the turnaround and throughput modes, please see the section on 'Execution modes' on https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/522689.
All options use KMP_BLOCKTIME = 200 by default. turnaround is also the default, when -mpmode is not set at all. The 'serial' mode is not used by COMSOL. The third value that COMSOL lists for -mpmode is 'owner'. The owner option is similar to turnaround, the difference is that owner also specifies a thread affinity that is optimized for the number of sockets on the computer, so owner is more aggressive than turnaround.
All options use KMP_BLOCKTIME = 200 by default. turnaround is also the default, when -mpmode is not set at all. The 'serial' mode is not used by COMSOL. The third value that COMSOL lists for -mpmode is 'owner'. The owner option is similar to turnaround, the difference is that owner also specifies a thread affinity that is optimized for the number of sockets on the computer, so owner is more aggressive than turnaround.
NUMA awareness
COMSOL is aware of NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) systems. NUMA systems can be systems with several CPU sockets or systems with CPUs based on multiple tiles. These systems are characterized by RAM memory modules that can be reached with different access times. COMSOL is automatically detecting the number of available sockets. Manual changes can be applied by specifying the Number of sockets in Preferences / Multicore and Cluster Computing. From the command line, the number of NUMA sets (sockets) can be set by means of the flag -numasets If you are using the MUMPS direct solver, switch to the PARDISO direct solver in COMSOL. It provides better shared-memory speedup for hight number of cores than MUMPS. By default, the Intel MKL library is used. For AMD processors with Linux you could also try the BLIS library by specifying -blas blis.
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See Also
See also Selecting hardware (solution 866).
See also Running COMSOL on clusters (solution 1001).
Comsol Multiphysics 5.4 For Mac
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