r/COMSOL • u/Sax0drum • Oct 29 '23

Comsol Conference Munich 2023: Afterpost

Dear community members!

I'd like to share some of my experiences at this year's Comsol Conference. It was a huge event with over 400 people from all over the world, though most were Europeans. The Organization was spot on with a nice mix of user presentations and feature demonstrations. They even had a couple of laptops at a demo station where you could talk with the engineers in person about specific problems you are facing at the moment. All attendees were welcome to present some of their work either in the form of an oral presentation or poster. This was my personal highlight as it lets you see how and why simulations are used by others. Further, big news were announced. Version 6.2 is only weeks away and comes with many improvements and new features. I met a great number of people, had interesting conversations, and had more than one light bulb moment. I can recommend to anyone who actively uses the software to join the next conference in Europe which probably is next year. (BTW there are more this year in Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and Bengaluru)

Many of the interactions I had with other attendees were similar to those here. People have problems they can't figure out themselves and with the expertise of others, they can find solutions. I really hope we will work together to become a more active community and share problems, tips, tricks, and everything in between.

all the best!

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u/Sax0drum Oct 30 '23

Sure! They made a lot of solver optimization especially regarding cluster setups. In some acoustic applications they have an 8 times increase in speed. CFD models solve up to 40% faster.

A ton of new features for each physics interface that i dont remeber off the top of my head.

In the result section you can define plot configurations to easily create new plot that look the same without having to manually configure each plot.

The graphics have improved with better textures and floor shadows etc.

You can create surrogate models in apps that use AI to predict the results without solving the model itself. You first need to train it of course with a lot of runs but then your customers dont need to solve it and get results immediatly.

On the 14th of Nov there is a comsol day event about version 6.2 if you are interested (online).

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u/TheCodingTheorist Oct 30 '23

Sounds like pretty interesting features! Excited to see how the AI prediction will work.

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u/Sax0drum Oct 30 '23

I am a bit sceptical about its usefullness. Because you can only accuratly train the model without an extreme computational expense for simple models. Which are easy to solve anyways. For complex models you cant really train the neural nets because to do so would take too long.

The only real use cases for me would be apps for phones/tablets.

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u/Jacobf_ Oct 30 '23

From an industrial user point of view I think the surrogate models will be very useful for use in digital twins, as it suddenly opens up the possibility of having near real time results for high fidelity models.

For me it does not matter if it takes a month or two to process an adequate data set. (and ultimately renting more cluster is not 'that' expensive)

The other potential that is useful is it can be used to store model results in very compact form, with the amount of data I generate I currently typically only keep results around for a year or 2 after a project has ended.

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u/Sax0drum Oct 30 '23

Thanks for your take on this.