[aspect-devel] Termination criteria module

[Eric Heien]

Hi everyone,

One of the students I'm working with has a request to add a special Aspect termination criteria.  Specifically, they want to run the simulation until it reaches "steady state", for various definitions of steady state.  Currently, they have to set a long end time and check on the state every hour or so to see when it has reached the appropriate point.  I've encountered similar issues when doing mixing simulations where I run simulations until dV_RMS/dT is small for an extended time period, then restart the simulation with tracer particles added to see how they move.

If nobody has any objections I'd like to add a module interface to Aspect to allow different termination criteria, defaulting to the current end time criteria.  This way compute and human time isn't wasted, and potentially complex simulations could be setup where the state is evolved to a point, checkpointed, and restarted using different parameters without any human intervention.

Let me know what you think,

-Eric