COMSOL

The COMSOL general-purpose engineering application is installed in both the Niagara and CC software stacks.

Getting a license

Licenses are provided by COMSOL. As commercial software you will require a license to use this package.

Running using the Niagara installation

COMSOL 5.3.1.275

In the Niagara software stack, commercial modules can only be accessed using the 'module use' command.

module use NiaEnv/2019b
module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load comsol/5.3.1.275

The same must be done to see these packages using module spider.

COMSOL 5.5

module use NiaEnv/2019b
module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load comsol/5.5

COMSOL 5.6

module use NiaEnv/2019b
module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load comsol/5.6

Setting up your .comsol directory

COMSOL will attempt to write to your $HOME/.comsol directory. This will work when you are testing your workflow on the login nodes, because they can write to $HOME. However, recall that the compute nodes cannot write to the /home filesystem. If you attempt to run COMSOL from a compute node using the default configuration, it will fail because COMSOL cannot write to $HOME/.comsol.

The solution is to create an alternative directory called $SCRATCH/.comsol, and create a soft link from $HOME/.comsol to $SCRATCH/.comsol:

mkdir $SCRATCH/.comsol
ln -s $SCRATCH/.comsol $HOME/.comsol

This will fool COMSOL into thinking it is writing to $HOME/.comsol, when in fact it is writing to $SCRATCH/.comsol. This command only needs to be run once.

Running COMSOL

Example submission script for a job running on 1 node, with max walltime of 11 hours:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=40
#SBATCH --time=11:00:00
#SBATCH --job-name test

module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load comsol/5.3.1.275

# DIRECTORY TO RUN - $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR is directory job was submitted from
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

NCORE=$((SLURM_NTASKS * SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK))
comsol batch -np $NCORE -inputfile myinputfile.mph -outputfile myoutputfile.mph

Running using the CC installation

COMSOL 5.3.1.275

To access the CC software stack you must unload the Niagara stack.

module load CCEnv
module load comsol/5.3.1.275

You can run the script given in the previous section by substituting the previous module commands with the above two.