Discussion Forum

Hello Kelvin Zhang

Your Discussion has gone 30 days without a reply. If you still need help with COMSOL and have an on-subscription license, please visit our Support Center for help.

If you do not hold an on-subscription license, you may find an answer in another Discussion or in the Knowledge Base.

Hey:

Did anyone manage to run Amazon Instance with Comsol

Regards,
Alex.

e-mail alxg@cypress.com

I'm trying this out and not having much luck. If anyone else was able to get it to work, please sure what you have done.

We have sunsetted our current offering on the Amazon cloud, in preparation for placing COMSOL 5.0 there. So 4.3 will not be able to be run from the cloud. We are working to make the process more straight forward, as for setting up COMSOL on Amazon and hope to have this available by the end of this month.

Interesting news, thank you. Mr. Nadon, can you also comment on the relative benefits of using Amazon's on-demand cloud computing vs. instead buying/using a powerful workstation located at one's own desk? Obviously, one's *connection* to a local workstation will be enormously faster (especially if using a relatively slow internet connection). So under what conditions is it beneficial to accept such slow internet connections, in order to take advantage of potentially large cloud resources? For example, if one regularly does problems that consume, say, an hour or two to complete, when using 12-cores (and with enough RAM to run the memory-intensive direct-solvers), would it already be a good idea to use the cloud instead? Or should one only turn to the cloud when, for example, problems consume say, 24 hours or more to complete? Alternatively, should one only use cloud computing when one's problems become too large to compute at all using one's local RAM, even when using the slower but far more memory-efficient iterative solvers? I suspect I am not the only one who would like some guidance and rules-of-thumb on this. Put yourself in my position. Would you: (1) Buy a bigger, faster PC (like one of those brand new custom 32-core workstations, along with 100's of GB of RAM), or (2) use the cloud instead, and don't worry about having a low/moderate-speed DSL connection to it? Your thoughts? Thank you in advance!

Hi Mr. Koslover,
We do not have any formal metrics where one is better used above the other. We would like to leave the choice to use either to the customer. My personal opinion would be that, if you have a model that you are going to be solving several times, or working with for periods of time, I recommend that the personal workstation be used to solve the model. If you have a large model that takes a long time to solve and is only going to be solved once or a few times, then the cloud may be an ideal option as the resources of the PC or workstation can be used elsewhere.
Robert Nadon
Systems Analyst
COMSOL Inc

Also, as for the the final question of whether to worry about slow connection speeds, I believe that is not where the major concern is for solving large models. The compute time as oppose to the network latency would generally be more of a factor. As for buying a system with 32 cores and 100 GB of RAM, there is a great knowledge-base article on recommended hardware for running COMSOL Multiphysics: www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/866/
I recommend reading that first.

Hope this helps,
Robert G. Nadon
COMSOL Inc.

Thanks for the info and the link to the informative item in the knowledge base.