COMSOL, Ansys donations increase access to advanced computing tools

As part of CRC’s ongoing efforts to make cutting-edge commercial software available as broadly as possible, CRC has secured expanded license agreements for both the COMSOL Multiphysics and Ansys Lumerical platforms. 

CRC, in partnership with the Swanson School of Engineering, has now upgraded the license for COMSOL Multiphysics to a Bundled Academic Term License that functions as a site license for research and teaching, which will offer significantly more seats for concurrent use and avoid license availability issues. 

The COMSOL Multiphysics platform has been available on CRC clusters since 2021. The platform offers finite element analysis solver and multi-physics simulation in an integrated development environment and unified workflow for domains ranging from electromagnetics to acoustics, chemistry and mechanics. COMSOL allows users to draw on either graphical drag-and-drop tools or command-line programming.

Ansys Lumerical is a suite of general-purpose photonic simulation tools used in modeling optical, electrical, thermal and quantum effects in designing circuits and systems at nanoscale. It has been available on CRC clusters with limited access, which blunted its potential research impact.

Now, thanks to a generous donation from Ansys, the broader research community can concurrently access 50 research licenses and 100 teaching licenses, as part of the company’s outreach to catalyze collaboration with Pitt. 

It is hard to exaggerate the value of these industry relationships to Pitt researchers,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research. “The expanded access unlocks greater participation, which inevitably leads to greater discovery, and their future innovations will become part of the relationship."

For instructions on how to access COMSOL, see this tutorial, https://crc.pitt.edu/user-support/installed-software/comsol-multiphysics. 

For instructions on how to access Lumerical, please see, https://crc.pitt.edu/lumerical. 

If you cannot find a software package that you need among our licenses, please contact us and we will try to obtain the license. Submit a help ticket if you encounter difficulty installing software.