Konstantin,
I have never used Comsol, and so can't really answer your question. But I
think you may enjoy reading some of the answers we got on the user survey and
which are listed here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1K2nhtfGuf15Cdw6E4_nbPk82zS9-XNfuRqOjFBWkp7E/viewanalytics
Best
Wolfgang
On 09/24/2016 05:40 AM, Konstantin Ladutenko wrote:
Any Comsol users switched to Deal.II to share their experience? Or using both
Deal.II and Comsol on everyday tasks?
Some questions behind this:
1) How I can motivate my colleagues to try Deal.II?
2) What are possible arguments to invest time into Deal.II instead of buying
one more Comsol license?
My thought on this (still I am not actually using any of them, so any comments
are welcome):
1) License cost?
Comsol license is quite expensive. However, if you put the scientist salary on
the board, it is not that straightforward. With Comsol it is quite easy to
become productive from day zero. To achieve the same technical level with
Deal.II you will need few weeks or even months of everyday use... There are so
many technical details under the hood hidden from Comsol user which you are
forced to be aware of with Deal.II. And even after mastering them both it
looks like using Comsol to create a new model (with new geometry and physics)
is cheaper compared to deal.ii as soon as you already have a license. And this
works even better when you scale up - for sure you need much less number of
licenses than a stuff count in the lab..
2) Control.
This is a real benefit from my point of view. You can put the C++ into version
control system and get all the improvements with simple diff. Probably Comsol
has some kind of "model review mode" to show all check boxes and list choices,
however, I was not able to locate this feature fast.
3) Adaptive mesh with hanging nodes.
It seems to be a unique Deal.II feature to be able to do a local refinement or
coarsening of the model. For sure it is very good, especially for large-scale
simulations.
The side effect is that it is very natural to do hp-refinement. For time
domain problems it is easy for Deal.II to follow with dense mesh alongside
with places, where it is actually needed.
4) Large models for HPC
This is mostly related to engenering tasks. However, if you have a large
problem it can be easier to solve it with Deal.II using HPC cluster. Using
100-1000 cores or more to get the result can speed up the progress a lot, and
such kind of clusters are quite affordable our days, it is quite easy to get a
HPC access for academic research. It looks like it is not feasible with Comsol
(at list I was not able to get data on more than a 20x parallel speedup with
0.8 efficiency for Comsol 4.2 in the internet).
5) Comsol is an integrated environment.
So it has the drawing, meshing, setting the model, evaluation, visualisation
in the same window, which is rather convenient. Actually this an argument
aginst Deal.II, where you should mostly rely on external tools for most of the
tasks. It is not a crucial problem, however, it complicates it a bit, e.g. to
set up a working environment or to become really productive...
Any comments on this? More killer features of Deal.ii are welcome!
Best regards,
Konstantin Ladutenko
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