Biowulf High Performance Computing at the NIH
Comsol on Biowulf

Comsol Multiphysics (previously named Femlab) is a modeling package for the simulation of any physical process you can describe with partial differential equations (PDEs). It features state-of-the-art solvers that address complex problems quickly and accurately, while its intuitive structure is designed to provide ease of use and flexibility.

Documentation
Important Notes

An X-Windows connection is required.

Interactive job
Interactive jobs should be used for debugging, graphics, or applications that cannot be run as batch jobs.

Allocate an interactive session and run the program.
Sample session (user input in bold):

[user@biowulf]$ sinteractive --cpus-per-task=14 --mem=20g --gres=lscratch:100
salloc.exe: Pending job allocation 46116226
salloc.exe: job 46116226 queued and waiting for resources
salloc.exe: job 46116226 has been allocated resources
salloc.exe: Granted job allocation 46116226
salloc.exe: Waiting for resource configuration
salloc.exe: Nodes cn3920 are ready for job

[user@cn3920 ~]$ module load Comsol
[user@cn3920 ~]$ comsol -tmpdir /lscratch/$SLURM_JOB_ID

[user@cn3920 ~]$ exit
salloc.exe: Relinquishing job allocation 46116226
[user@biowulf ~]$

You should see the Comsol Desktop image as below:

Comsol Desktop

After the first time running, the default location of Comsol output is generated in your home directory:

[user@biowulf]$ ls ~/.comsol
v61

Because your /home directory is limited in space, it is a good idea to move and symlink the ~/.comsol directory to your /data directory, where there is a much larger amount of disk space available. This can be done like this:

[user@biowulf]$ mv ~/.comsol /data/$USER/comsol ; ln -s /data/$USER/comsol ~/.comsol