Platform: Macintosh Versions: 6.1

Description

Please note This entry concerns COMSOL 6.1. For COMSOL 6.0, please see Knowledge Base 1294

System Requirements

  • COMSOL 6.1 for macOS Intel can not be used under Rosetta on Apple Silicon computers.
  • LiveLink for MATLAB and LiveLink for Simulink requires Rosetta 2.
  • For the CAD Import Module and the Design Module, file import of the ACIS, IGES, PTC® Creo® Parametric™, PTC® Creo® Elements Pro, STEP, and PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® file formats requires Rosetta 2.

Notes on Performance

  • For optimal performance COMSOL uses only the performance cores of the Apple SoC. Because of this it may appear that COMSOL is not using all CPU resources.
  • For newer Apple silicon SoCs (released after COMSOL 6.1), setting the number of performance cores may have to be done manually from Settings → Multicore and Cluster Computing. Otherwise, COMSOL may end up being allocated to efficiency cores instead of performance cores resulting in poor performance.
  • Poor performance can be caused by setting COMSOL as a low priority process. This can happen, for example, when launching COMSOL from Cron or Launchd, or by enabling very conservative power saving settings in macOS.
  • For certain models, running COMSOL with the BLAS library OpenBLAS rather than the default vecLib library can lead to performance improvements. To use OpenBLAS, append -blas openblas to your COMSOL Start command.

Known Issues

  • Virtual memory usage is not properly reported.
  • External MATLAB® Function calls are not supported.
  • The PARDISO solver is not supported, so when PARDISO is selected COMSOL will automatically switch to the MUMPS solver with settings selected to emulate PARDISO. For certain models, this can lead to poor performance. For improved performance, manually select the MUMPS solver in the Direct nodes in the Solver sequence.