[CIG-MC] Aspect 0.1 released

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

After lots of developing, debugging, and documenting, we have finally 
released Aspect version 0.1. Aspect -- short for Advanced Solver for 
Problems in Earth's ConvecTion -- is a code intended as a simulator for 
thermally driven convection, for example in the earth mantle. Its design 
goals are:
- Use of modern numerical methods, such as (i) higher order finite
   elements, (ii) adaptivity, (iii) efficient and scalable solvers
   and preconditioners, (iv) parallelization to hundreds of processors
   and beyond.
- Reuse of widely used, well tested library to provide the underlying
   numerical framework; specifically, Aspect builds on deal.II, Trilinos
   and p4est.
- Extensibility: It should be easy to replace the geometry model or the
   rheology, as well as a host of other things that characterize a
   problem under consideration.

The Aspect homepage is located at
   http://dealii.org/aspect/
where you can also find links to the tar-file for download as well as to 
the manual. We look forward to your feedback!

Best
   Wolfgang Bangerth
   Timo Heister
   Thomas Geenen
   Martin Kronbichler

PS: This being version 0.1, you may wonder what's still missing. By and 
large, we are quite confident in the correctness of the code as well as 
with the performance of it. Some of the things that didn't make it into 
this first release are:
- Some sections in the manual aren't written yet.
- There currently aren't enough cookbook examples.
- The current algorithm is using an operator splitting technique to deal
   with nonlinear material laws. This will ultimately be rewritten to use
   a Newton-type method.
We hope to get to these points in the near future.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth               email:            bangerth at math.tamu.edu
                                 www: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~bangerth/