[CIG-MC] Aspect plans for the future (and things we've worked on lately)

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

All,
Lorraine asked us to provide some feedback on what we have been doing with the 
Aspect code (http://aspect.dealii.org/) in the past few months and, in 
particular what our plans for the next year. Since Aspect is a code for the 
community, it makes sense to discuss these in the community. Below please find 
a draft of this document. We are looking for feedback whether that's sensible 
and/or what your opinions are!

Best & thanks
  Wolfgang & Timo


Activities in the past 6 months:
./ Worked on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, explained the results
    and reproduced the results reported in the literature
    (combined effort over the mailing list)
./ Implementation in Aspect to (optionally) use PETSc instead of
    Trilinos and necessary work in deal.II for this (Timo)
./ Training a student to work on improving temperature stabilization
    scheme, ongoing progress (Timo)
./ As a result the student contributed smaller features and bugfixes in
    Aspect (typos, hitting end time exactly) (Timo)
./ New Aspect virtual machine (Timo)
./ Implement periodic domains (Timo)
./ Cookbook: 3d convection (Wolfgang)
./ Cookbook: Rayleigh-Taylor instability (Wolfgang)
./ Implementation of models that treat the melt fraction as a function of
    pressure and temperature (Wolfgang with Juliane Dannberg)
./ Implementation of models with latent heat (Wolfgang with Juliane Dannberg)
./ Fixes in the nonlinear solvers (Wolfgang)
./ Fixes for shear heating models (Wolfgang)
./ Fixes for compressible models (Wolfgang)
./ Several more cookbooks that show how to use Aspect and set up input files 
(Wolfgang)
./ Benchmarking to very large runs (up to 300+M unknowns on 6000+ processors,
    with Rene Gassmoeller)
./ Big speedups in assembly (30-50%)
./ Better testing for 3d experiments
./ Youtube videos showing 2d and 3d results to help with publicity and outreach
./ A new section in the manual providing guidelines for faster computations
./ Some work on refactoring the tracer implementation (Eric, with some help by 
Wolfgang)
./ Better support for snapshot/resume


Plans for the remaining months of the current project year and project year 5:
./ Development of Aspect tutorials that can be used for training sessions in
    the future. Providing such training sessions at the CIDER (Timo), SEDI 
(Wolfgang)
    and other meetings (e.g., at a European meeting later this year by Juliane 
Dannberg).
./ 3d shell computations (Wolfgang)
./ Participation in the 3d shell benchmarking effort
./ Reproducing more of the existing benchmarks
./ Improving temperature/composition stabilization scheme (Timo)
./ Active tracers (with Eric)
./ Better support for levelset-like compositional fields (accuracy, stability)
./ Parallel benchmarking of deal.II and Aspect to find bottlenecks
./ Working with members of the community to get their patches into Aspect,
    in particular on melt models
./ More cookbooks
./ Nonlinear models: more testing and (likely) bug fixing
./ Porting to new platforms (e.g., the Bluegene/Q machine at Texas A&M and
    the machines at the German High Performance Computing Centers)
./ Continued work on improving the manual
./ New Aspect releases
./ Work on a second Aspect publication detailing, among other topics, how
    Aspect treats compressible models


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