COMSOL 6.1 macOS Apple Silicon Native Support

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.

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