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Warning!

Puhti and Mahti are being decommissioned in stages, and their storage areas will become fully unavailable from 15 October 2026. Clean up unnecessary files and move any data you need to keep by 31 August 2026. See the Roihu data migration guide for instructions on transferring your data to Roihu.

Puhti scratch is very full: keep only active data there and move or delete everything else. No new Puhti scratch quota will be granted.

COMSOL Multiphysics

The COMSOL Multiphysics simulation environment facilitates all steps in the modeling process; defining your geometry, specifying your physics, meshing, solving and then post-processing your results.

Setting up the model up is quick, thanks to a number of predefined modeling interfaces for applications ranging from fluid flow and heat transfer to structural mechanics and electromagnetic analyses. Material properties, source terms and boundary conditions can all be arbitrary functions of the dependent variables.

Available

COMSOL is available on CSC's Roihu supercomputer on both the CPU and GPU (aarch64) partitions.

License

The terms of use of this software allow it to be used only by affiliates (staff and students) of Finnish higher education institutions.

Usage

The following modules are currently available:

  • Acoustics
  • AC/DC
  • CAD Import
  • CFD
  • Heat Transfer
  • Particle Tracing
  • Structural Mechanics

To find out which versions of COMSOL are installed on Roihu, give a command 

module available
and check lines comsol/<version number>. For example, to load comsol version 6.4, give a command 
module load comsol/64

There are example batch job files available on Roihu server in directories 

/appl/soft/manual/eng/x86_64/comsol/example_batch_job_scripts
and 
/appl/soft/manual/eng/aarch64/comsol/example_batch_job_scripts
Copy the file and modify it for your own use.

The preferred method to use COMSOL interactively is via the Roihu web interface. In the web interface, select Desktop from the Apps view and specify the required resources (cores, execution time and memory). Remember to add your billing project, too.

Wait for a while as your interactive job sits in the queue and after that you can start COMSOL with double-clinking its icon (tick the box if you want to receive an email when your session starts).

Note

You can now also enable interactive visualization with GPU acceleration for better performance. In this case, select Accelerated visualization instead of Desktop in the Puhti web interface.

Sometimes, you may encounter errors relating to OpenGL rendering during the launch. The solution is to force COMSOL to start with software rendering from Desktop app Terminal using

module load comsol
comsol -3drend sw

Support

In case of issues, please contact CSC Service Desk.

More information