=== Development plans for Aspect ===

==== Mission and General Plan ====

The goal of ASPECT is to provide the geoscience community with an extensible
software written in C++ to support research in simulating convection in the
Earth mantle and elsewhere by providing a well-documented, tested code base.

The general goals are:
  - To include community developed features: provide help and review contributions
  - To run tutorials and hackathons
  - To fix bugs and maintain the code base
  - Benchmarking and implementation of new features based on CIG and community feedback
  - To provide regular software releases
  - To provide support via mailing list, github issues, etc.


==== Suggested current work items (2017) ====

  - Interface to couple BurnMan & ASPECT
  - Revision of the 2nd ASPECT paper
  - Work on deal.II related features
  - Initial work on coupling with the mineral physics toolbox BurnMan
  - Deprecation of outdated features towards ASPECT 2.0
  - Redesign of non-linear solver infrastructure (tests/benchmarks)
  - Merge the Newton solver
  - Implement and test the new parameter GUI

==== Long term plan ====

  - Stokes Solver improvements (melt preconditioner, Schur complement improvements, GMG)
  - Benchmarking of different compressible formulations
  - Participate in community benchmark efforts
  - Perform parallel performance benchmarking of deal.II and ASPECT to increase efficiency
  - Develop a robust non-linear solver framework
  - Develop a robust and scalable passive and active tracer code
  - Improve interoperability with codes used in other fields of study e.g. mineral physics, seismology, or the planetary sciences
  - Provide coupling with the mineral physics toolbox BurnMan

==== Completed Items ====

Early 2017:

  - ASPECT 1.5.0 release
  - We successfully benchmarked ASPECT with the Blankenbach benchmarks
  - Initial work on parameter GUI

Oct 2016 - Jan 2017:
  - Mini hackathon in December before AGU
  - The 2nd ASPECT paper got submitted
  - We implemented and merged a correct Boussinesq, ALA, and TALA approximation
  - We successfully benchmarked ASPECT with the TanGurnis and King2010 benchmarks
  - The melt paper has been published
  - The free surface paper “Stability and accuracy of free surface time integration in viscous flows” has been accepted
  - We have merged a large number of improvements to the particle code, making it vastly faster than it was before
  - A paper describing the techniques underlying the particle code has been written and submitted
  - We wrote an initial BurnMan coupling module for adiabatic conditions coming out of mineral physics data