Using COMSOL Software on the Eagle System

COMSOL Multiphysics is a versatile finite element analysis and simulation package. The COMSOL Desktop GUI (graphical user interface) offers an environment for building and solving models. It provides script-based modeling capabilities.

Currently, we host three floating network licenses and a number of additional modules. Issue the command lmstat.comsol to see current license status and COMSOL modules available.

Building a COMSOL Model

Extensive documentation is available in the menu: Help > Documentation and in Help > Dynamic Help. For beginners, it is highly recommended to follow the steps in Introduction to COMSOL Multiphysics found in Help > Documentation.

For instructional videos, see the COMSOL website.

Running COMSOL Interactively

License status, including how many licenses are presently checked out, can be viewed by invoking the following command:

[user@el3 ~]$ lmstat.comsol

COMSOL can be used by starting the COMSOL GUI that allows one to build models, run the COMSOL computational engine, and analyze results. With the COMSOL engine running on Eagle, the input to and output from the GUI must be available on a remote machine. The remote machine must be able to send/receive information for X Windows.

From the Terminal application on a FastX desktop, the following should bring up the COMSOL interface.

[user@ed3 ~]$ module purge
[user@ed3 ~]$ module load comsol/5.4
[user@ed3 ~]$ vglrun comsol

From an X-enabled shell on a compute node, replace the last command with

[user@r1i7n24 ~]$ comsol -3drend sw

Running a COMSOL Job in Batch Mode

You can save your model built in GUI mode into a file such as myinputfile.mph. Once that's available, the following job script shows how to run a single process multithreaded job in batch mode:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=comsol-batch-1proc
#SBATCH --time=00:20:00
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --account=<your-allocation-id>
#SBATCH --output=comsol-%j.out
#SBATCH --error=comsol-%j.err

# This helps ensure your job runs from the directory
# from which you ran the sbatch command
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

# Set up environment, and list to stdout for verification
module purge
module load comsol/5.4
echo " "
module list
echo " "

inputfile=$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/myinputfile.mph
outputfile=$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/myoutputfilename
logfile=$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/mylogfilename

# Run a COMSOL job with 36 threads.
# -np = number of threads per rank

comsol batch -np 36 -inputfile $inputfile -outputfile $outputfile –batchlog $logfile

Once this script file (assumed to be named script-comsol.slurm) is saved, it can be submitted to the job scheduler with

[user@el3 ~]$ sbatch script-comsol.slurm

Running a Multiprocess COMSOL Job

To configure a COMSOL job with multiple MPI ranks, the example Slurm script here might serve as a template:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=comsol-batch-4proc
#SBATCH --time=00:20:00
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=2
#SBATCH --account=<your-allocation-id>
#SBATCH --output=comsol-%j.out
#SBATCH --error=comsol-%j.err

# This helps ensure your job runs from the directory
# from which you ran the sbatch command
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

# Set up environment, and list to stdout for verification
module purge
module load comsol/5.4
echo " "
module list
echo " "

inputfile=$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/myinputfile.mph
outputfile=$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/myoutputfilename
logfile=$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/mylogfilename

# Run a 2-node, 4-rank parallel COMSOL job with 18 threads for each rank.
# -nn = total number of MPI ranks
# -nnhost = number of MPI ranks per host
# -np = number of threads per rank

comsol –nn 4 -nnhost 2 batch -np 18 -inputfile $inputfile -outputfile $outputfile –batchlog $logfile

The job script is submitted to the scheduler just the same as above for the single-process example.