Gautam advised me against trying to install version 5.3, lest it break version 5.1--I had already gone through the install, but looking at the install manual it says it shouldn't affect previous installs except that the default behavior when double clicking .mph files will always choose the latest version of COMSOL. Since we mostly run on the command line we should be fine. That said I haven't tested files with COMSOL 5.1.

Zach pointed me to sandbox1.ligo.caltech.edu at the lunch meeting, as well as these notes from Rana about running comsol on a remote server. I couldn't run the file myself on sandbox1 because I don't yet have a home directory there, but I asked Larry if he could set one up for me so I can use the clusters. Gautam helped me run them on sandbox1 by having me scp the file onto the shared 40m drive, then he moved it in to his home directory on sandbox1 and ran it. A version of the model asking for an analysis at 60Hz and 600Hz ran in 10-20 min, and looked good (I was able to scp the output to my laptop and open it in the gui, though I have a script not quite to the point where Matlab can do this for me, it's not ready yet and anyway I wanted to directly see that the output was normal). I modified the study to take 100 steps between 60Hz and 5kHz, and Gautam has now started that run, which if it scales linearly (hopefully better than linear, since it won't have to remesh and etc) will take about 8-16 hours.

Thank you Gautam for the extended mattermost session helping me run these!