Editor’s Pick of the Week, 4 in a Series

By Jonathan Gourlay

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

In early October, at its 2007 users conference in Boston, COMSOL Inc. announced version 3.4 of COMSOL Multiphysics, its engineering and scientific environment for modeling and simulating physics-based systems. The company improved all areas of its core application, and they also enhanced their full suite of physics-specific modules for specialized simulations such as acoustics, heat transfers, MEMS,  RF, reaction engineering, signal processing, and structural mechanics. Especially interesting are new features like multiphase flow simulation in the Chemical Engineering Module and the SPICE import capability in the AC/DC Module.

But the really big news is that COMSOL Multiphysics now supports multicore processors. This means that you can leverage the speed and performance of parallel computing throughout your solution process. Multicore processing slashes time to solution by letting you use the maximum number of cores available on your workstation to go at a problem. This not only means faster solutions, but it requires less memory, so you use your workstation for,  say, writing a report or searching the web while simultaneously solving a fluid-structure interaction or something equally as intense. Here’s the idea:  COMSOL ran some benchmarks comparing version 3.4 to its predecessors and found that 3.4 solves problems like fluid flows up to five times faster.

COMSOL Multiphysics 3.4 provides fully parallelized meshing for assemblies straight out of the box, new Galerkin Least Squares stabilization techniques, a segregated solver that reduces memory consumption when you tackle huge problems, and new tools to handle turbulent and laminar flow with variable densities. But again, the big news is that COMSOL Multiphysics 3.4 supports multicore parallel processing, enabling you to run more in-depth and more compute-intensive analyses more quickly than was conceivable before.

All the enhancements in COMSOL Multiphysics 3.4 and its physics-specific add-on modules are too numerous to list here. So, check out today’s Pick of the Week write-up for the complete skinny. In the write-up, you’ll also find a link to COMSOL’s image gallery. It breaks down COMSOL Multiphysics’s flexibility by engineering and scientific disciple. It’s neat.

Click here for the Editor’s Pick of the Week.

—Jonathan Gourlay
Features Editor, Desktop Engineering magazine