System Requirements for Microsoft Windows

General Requirements

These requirements are common to all platforms:

Floating Network Licenses

Floating network licenses are supported on heterogeneous networks of Windows, Linux, and Mac computers. Both the license manager and the COMSOL application can run on either Windows, Linux, or Mac, and a single computer can run both of them.

COMSOL Multiphysics System Requirements for Windows

System Requirements for 32-bit Windows

System Requirements for 64-bit Windows

Graphics System Requirements

Prefer hardware rendering for performance reasons: drivers supporting OpenGL version 1.3 or DirectX version 9 are required. Alternatively, use software rendering.

Automatic Updates

Use Automatic Updates to keep your Windows system up-to-date. You can access it and turn it on from the Control Panel.

Optional LiveLink for MATLAB Requirements

The LiveLink for MATLAB is compatible with MATLAB 2009b and MATLAB 2010a.

Optional Products for CAD Interoperability

The following products support import of 3D CAD files on Windows platforms:

Product Supported file formats Required products
CAD Import Module ACIS (SAT), IGES, Inventor, Parasolid, Pro/E, SolidWorks, and STEP COMSOL Multiphysics
LiveLink™ for SolidWorks® Same as above COMSOL Multiphysics
LiveLink™ for Inventor® Same as above COMSOL Multiphysics
LiveLink™ for Pro/ENGINEER® Same as above COMSOL Multiphysics
File Import for CATIA® V5 CATIA V5 CAD Import Module, or a LiveLink product for a CAD package

LiveLink™ for SolidWorks®

The bidirectional interface to SolidWorks requires SolidWorks 2009 or 2010.

LiveLink™ for Inventor®

The bidirectional interface to Autodesk Inventor requires Autodesk Inventor 2010 or Autodesk Inventor 2011.

LiveLink™ for Pro/ENGINEER®

The bidirectional interface to Pro/ENGINEER requires Wildfire 4.0 or Wildfire 5.0.

Parallel System Requirements

COMSOL 4.0 supports shared-memory parallelism and distributed-memory parallelism on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Distributed-memory parallelism requires Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or Windows HPC Server 2008.

Internet Protocol Support

IPv4 and IPv6 are supported on all Windows platforms.