Table of Contents

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:

  1. To include community developed features: provide help and review contributions
  2. To run tutorials and hackathons
  3. To fix bugs and maintain the code base
  4. Benchmarking and implementation of new features based on CIG and community feedback
  5. To provide regular software releases
  6. To provide support via mailing list, github issues, etc.

Suggested current work items (2017)

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 Deprecation of outdated features towards ASPECT 2.0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

Long term plan

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

Completed Items

Early 2017:

  1. ASPECT 1.5.0 release
  2. We successfully benchmarked ASPECT with the Blankenbach benchmarks
  3. Initial work on parameter GUI

Oct 2016 - Jan 2017:

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