Releases: geodynamics/aspect
ASPECT 2.5.0
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.5.0. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid solvers, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://geodynamics.org/resources/aspect
and
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.5.0
Among others this release includes the following significant changes:
-
ASPECT now includes version 0.5.0 of the Geodynamic World Builder.
(Menno Fraters and other contributors) -
ASPECT's manual has been converted from LaTeX to Markdown to be hosted as a
website at https://aspect-documentation.readthedocs.io.
(Chris Mills, Mack Gregory, Timo Heister, Wolfgang Bangerth, Rene
Gassmoeller, and many others) -
New: ASPECT now requires deal.II 9.4 or newer.
(Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister) -
ASPECT now supports a DebugRelease build type that creates a debug build and
a release build of ASPECT at the same time. It can be enabled by setting the
CMake option CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to DebugRelease or by typing "make debugrelease".
(Timo Heister) -
ASPECT now has a CMake option ASPECT_INSTALL_EXAMPLES that allows building
and install all cookbooks and benchmarks. ASPECT now additionally installs
the data/ directory. Both changes are helpful for installations that are used
for teaching and tutorials.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
Changed: ASPECT now releases the memory used for storing initial conditions
and the Geodynamic World Builder after model initialization unless an
owning pointer to these objects is kept. This reduces the memory footprint
for models initialized from large data files.
(Wolfgang Bangerth) -
Added: Various helper functions to distinguish phase transitions for
different compositions and compositional fields of different types.
(Bob Myhill) -
Added: The 'adiabatic' initial temperature plugin can now use a spatially
variable top boundary layer thickness read from a data file or specified as a
function in the input file. Additionally, the boundary layer temperature can
now also be computed following the plate cooling model instead of the
half-space cooling model.
(Daniel Douglas, John Naliboff, Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: ASPECT now supports tangential velocity boundary conditions with GMG for
more geometries, such as 2D and 3D chunks.
(Timo Heister, Haoyuan Li, Jiaqi Zhang) -
New: Phase transitions can now be deactivated outside a given temperature
range specified by upper and lower temperature limits for each phase
transition. This allows implementing complex phase diagrams with transitions
that intersect in pressure-temperature space.
(Haoyuan Li) -
New: There is now a postprocessor that outputs the total volume of the
computational domain. This can be helpful for models using mesh deformation.
(Anne Glerum) -
New: Added a particle property 'grain size' that tracks grain size evolution
on particles using the 'grain size' material model.
(Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller) -
Fixed: Many bugs, see link below for a complete list.
(Many authors. Thank you!).
A complete list of all changes and their authors can be found at
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/doc/doxygen/changes_between_2_84_80_and_2_85_80.html
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Menno Fraters, Rene Gassmoeller,
Anne Glerum, Timo Heister, Bob Myhill, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
ASPECT 2.4.0
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.4.0. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid solvers, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://geodynamics.org/resources/aspect
and
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.4.0
Among others this release includes the following significant changes:
-
New: ASPECT now requires deal.II 9.3.0 or newer, and cmake 3.1.0 or newer.
(Timo Heister) -
New: The matrix-free GMG Stokes solver now works for problems with
free-surface boundaries and elasticity.
(Jiaqi Zhang, Anne Glerum, Timo Heister, John Naliboff) -
New: The matrix-free GMG Stokes preconditioner is now implemented for the
Newton solver.
(Timo Heister, Menno Fraters, Jiaqi Zhang) -
New: Visualization postprocessors now record the physical units of the
quantity they compute, and this information is also output into visualization
files with a sufficiently new version of deal.II.
(Wolfgang Bangerth) -
New: Where possible, when using large data tables as input (e.g., for initial
conditions specified as tables), these data are now stored only once on each
node in memory areas that is accessible by all MPI processes on that node.
(Wolfgang Bangerth) -
New: There is now a new material model for melting in the lowermost mantle.
It can be used to reproduce the results of Dannberg et al. (2021).
(Juliane Dannberg) -
New: The geoid postprocessor can now handle a deforming mesh, in addition to the
already existing option from the dynamic topography postprocessor output.
(Maaike Weerdesteijn, Rene Gassmoeller, Jacky Austermann) -
New: There is now a 'static' option for the temperature field that is set-up
similarly to the 'static' option for compositional fields. This allows the
temperature field to be constant over time so you can still advect and build
up elastic stresses.
(Rebecca Fildes, Magali Billen) -
Changed: The least squares particle interpolation plugins now provide a bound
preserving slope limiter that respects local bounds on each cell.
(Mack Gregory, Gerry Puckett, Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: Add an advection field method that advects a compositional field
according to Darcy's Law.
(Daniel Douglas) -
New: The material model 'dynamic_friction' has been integrated into a new
rheology model friction_models that can be used together with the
visco_plastic material model.
(Esther Heckenbach) -
New: ASPECT now has a ThermodynamicTableLookup equation of state plugin,
which allows material models to read in one or more Perple_X or HeFESTo table
files.
(Bob Myhill) -
Changed: The initial composition model called 'ascii data' can now read in 3d
ascii datasets into a 2d model and slice the dataset in a user controlled
plane. This allows it to make high-resolution 2d models of problems that use
observational data (such as seismic tomography models).
(Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: Added a new postprocessor which computes the parameter "Mobility"
following Lourenco et al., 2020.
(Elodie Kendall, Rene Gassmoeller, Anne Glerum and Bob Myhill) -
Improved: Particle operations have been significantly accelerated, in
particular in combination with a recent deal.II version (9.4.0 or newer).
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: Add a benchmark for load induced flexure with options for specifying
sediment and rock material infilling the flexural moat.
(Daniel Douglas) -
New: ASPECT now has a cookbook that uses the gravity postprocessor to
compute gravity generated by S40RTS-based mantle density variations.
(Cedric Thieulot) -
New: ASPECT now has a cookbook that shows how velocities can be prescribed
at positions specified by an ASCII input file.
(Bob Myhill) -
New: There is now a cookbook of kinematically driven oceanic subduction in 2D
with isoviscous materials and without temperature effects. The cookbook model
setup is based on Quinquis (2014).
(Anne Glerum) -
New: There is now a cookbook that visualizes the phase diagram from results
of a model run. This includes examples from the Visco-Plastic and Steinberger
material model.
(Haoyuan Li and Magali Billen) -
New: There is now a cookbook that reproduces convection models with a phase
function from Christensen and Yuen, 1985.
(Juliane Dannberg) -
Fixed: Many bugs, see link below for a complete list.
(Many authors. Thank you!).
A complete list of all changes and their authors can be found at
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/doc/doxygen/changes_between_2_83_80_and_2_84_80.html
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Menno Fraters, Rene Gassmoeller,
Anne Glerum, Timo Heister, Bob Myhill, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
v2.4.0-rc1
version 2.4.0-rc1
ASPECT 2.3.0
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.3.0. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid solvers, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://geodynamics.org/cig/software/aspect/
and
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.3.0
Among others this release includes the following significant changes:
-
New: ASPECT now requires deal.II 9.2.0 or newer.
(Timo Heister) -
New: ASPECT has a new, reproducible logo.
(Rene Gassmoeller, Juliane Dannberg) -
New: Mesh deformation now also works in combination with particles. Instead
of the end of the timestep, particles are now advected before solving
the compositional field advection equations. In iterative advection
schemes, the particle location is restored before each iteration.
(Anne Glerum, Rene Gassmoeller, Robert Citron) -
New: ASPECT now supports the creation of visualization postprocessors that
only output data on the surface of a model. An example is the "surface
stress" visualization postprocessor.
(Wolfgang Bangerth) -
New: A new class TimeStepping::Manager to control time stepping with a plugin
architecture has been added. The architecture allows to repeat time steps
if the time step length changes significantly.
(Timo Heister) -
New: A mesh refinement plugin that allows to set regions of minimum and
maximum refinement level between isosurfaces of solution variables.
(Menno Fraters and Haoyuan Li) -
New: There is a new nullspace removal option 'net surface rotation',
which removes the net rotation of the surface.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: Particle advection can now be used in combination with the repetition of
timesteps. Before each repetition the particles are restored to their previous
position.
(Anne Glerum) -
New: There is a new property in the depth average postprocessor that averages
the mass of a compositional field (rather than its volume).
(Juliane Dannberg) -
New: The Drucker Prager rheology module now has an option to include a
plastic damper, which acts to stabilize the plasticity formulation. At
sufficient resolutions for a given plastic damper viscosity, the plastic
shear band characteristics will be resolution independent.
(John Naliboff and Cedric Thieulot) -
New: ASPECT can now compute viscosity values depending on the values
of phase functions for an arbitrary number of phases.
(Haoyuan Li, 2020/08/06) -
New: Added calculation for temperature-dependent strain healing in the strain
dependent rheology module.
(Erin Heilman) -
New: Added new rheology module, which computes the
temperature dependent Frank Kamenetskii viscosity approximation.
(Erin Heilman) -
New: ASPECT now includes a CompositeViscoPlastic rheology module. This
rheology is an isostress composite of diffusion, dislocation and Peierls
creep rheologies and optionally includes a damped Drucker-Prager plastic
element. The rheology module for Peierls creep includes a formulation to
compute the exact Peierls viscosity, using an internal Newton-Raphson
iterative scheme.
(Bob Myhill, John Naliboff and Magali Billen) -
New: There is a new visualization postprocessor 'principal stress',
which outputs the principal stress values and directions at every point in the
model.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: Added the functionality to compute averages in user defined depth layers
(e.g. lithosphere, asthenosphere, transition zone, lower mantle) to the depth
average postprocessor and the lateral averaging plugin.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: The 'spherical shell' geometry model now supports periodic boundary
conditions in polar angle direction for a 2D quarter shell (90 degree opening
angle).
(Kiran Chotalia, Timo Heister, Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: A new particle interpolator based on quadratic least squares has been
added.
(Mack Gregory, Gerry Puckett) -
New: There is now a mesh deformation plugin "diffusion" that can be used to
diffuse surface topography in box geometry models.
(Anne Glerum) -
Bug fixes to: Steinberger and Calderwood viscosity profile, particle
generation, viscous strain weakening, incompressible equation of state,
pressure sign convention, Neumann heat flow boundaries with the Newton
solver, viscosity on the adiabat for extended Boussinesq approximation
models, and many more.
(many authors)
A complete list of all changes and their contributing authors can be found at
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/doc/doxygen/changes_between_2_82_80_and_2_83_80.html
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Menno Fraters, Rene Gassmoeller,
Anne Glerum, Timo Heister, Bob Myhill, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
ASPECT 2.2.0
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.2.0. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://geodynamics.org/cig/software/aspect/
and
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.2.0
This release includes the following significant changes:
-
New: There is a new matrix-free Stokes solver which uses geometric multigrid.
This method is significantly faster than the default algebraic multigrid
preconditioner and uses less memory. Free surface and melt transport are not
yet implemented.
(Thomas C. Clevenger, Timo Heister) -
New: There is now a new approximation for the compressible convection
models that is called 'projected density field'.
(Rene Gassmoeller, Juliane Dannberg, Timo Heister, Wolfgang Bangerth) -
Changed: The Geodynamic World Builder has been updated to version 0.3.0.
(Menno Fraters) -
Changed: ASPECT now requires deal.II version 9.0.0 or newer.
(Timo Heister, Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: There is a new, alternative stabilization method for the advection equation
called SUPG.
(Thomas C. Clevenger, Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister, Ryan Grove) -
Changed: The entropy viscosity method for stabilizing the advection equations
was substantially improved leading to less artificial diffusion in particular
close to boundaries.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: The 'visco plastic' material model now has an option to simulate
viscoelastic-plastic deformation. The 'viscoelastic plastic' material
model has been superseded and removed.
(John Naliboff, Dan Sandiford) -
New: The "Free surface" functionality has been generalized and is now part of
"Mesh deformation". This change is incompatible to old parameter files that
used the free surface.
(Rene Gassmoeller, Anne Glerum, Derek Neuharth, Marine Lasbleis) -
New benchmarks: entropy equation, viscoelastic cantilever, bouyancy-driven
viscoelastic plate stress, advection in annulus, slab detachment benchmark,
several advection benchmarks, rigid shear, polydiapirs, surface loading.
(Wolfgang Bangerth, Fiona Clerc, Juliane Dannberg, Daniel Douglas, Rene
Gassmoeller, Timo Heister, Garrett Ito, Harsha Lokavarapu, John Naliboff,
Elbridge G. Puckett, Cedric Thieulot) -
Incompatibility: The option to use PETSc for linear algebra has been removed
until further notice.
(Timo Heister) -
New: If the user has the libdap libraries installed then input data can be
pulled from the server instead of a local file.
(Kodi Neumiller, Sarah Stamps, Emmanuel Njinju, James Gallagher) -
New: Implement the "no Advection, single Stokes" and
"single Advection, iterated Newton Stokes" solver schemes.
(Timo Heister, Anne Glerum) -
New: The chunk geometry model can now incorporate initial
topography from an ascii data file.
(Anne Glerum) -
New: The 'depth average' postprocessor now additionally computes the laterally
averaged density of vertical mass flux for each depth slice in the model.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
Changed: The gravity point values postprocessor has been significantly extended.
(Ludovic Jeanniot, Cedric Thieulot) -
New: There is now a general class
MaterialModel::Utilities::PhaseFunction
that can be used to model
phase transitions using a smooth phase function.
(Rene Gassmoeller, John Naliboff, Haoyuan Li) -
New: ASPECT now includes a thermodynamically self-consistent compressible
material model, that implements the Modified Tait equation of state that is
described in Holland and Powell, 2011.
(Bob Myhill) -
New: The material models can now outsource the computation of the viscosity
into a separate rheology model.
(Rene Gassmoeller) -
New: ASPECT now includes initial temperature and initial composition plugins
that use ASCII data files to define the initial temperature or composition
at a series of layer boundaries.
(Sophie Coulson, Anne Glerum, Bob Myhill) -
New: Extended spherical shell geometry model to include custom mesh schemes.
(Ludovic Jeanniot, Marie Kajan, Wolfgang Bangerth) -
New: There is a new termination criterion that cancels the model run
when a steady state average temperature is reached.
(Rene Gassmoeller, Juliane Dannberg, Eva Bredow) -
Bug fixes to : parallel hdf5 output, chunk geometry model, initial
topography modules, gplates boundary velocity plugin.
(many authors)
A complete list of changes and their contributing authors can be found at
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/doc/doxygen/changes_between_2_81_80_and_2_82_80.html
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister,
Jacqueline Austermann, Menno Fraters, Anne Glerum, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
ASPECT 2.1.0
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.1.0. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.1.0
This release includes the following significant changes:
- New: ASPECT has a new plugin system that allows it to prescribe a fixed
heat flux (instead of prescribing the temperature) at the model boundaries. - New: Compositional fields can optionally be advected with the melt velocity.
- New: There is now a visualization postprocessor that outputs the compaction
length, the characteristic length scale of melt transport. - New: ASPECT can optionally use the Geodynamic World Builder
(https://github.com/GeodynamicWorldBuilder/WorldBuilder/) to create complex
initial conditions for temperature and composition. - New: ASPECT can now read in a depth-dependent vs to density conversion file, which
can be used with the included tomography model plugins. - New: ASPECT can now read in a depth-dependent initial temperature from file.
- New: The 'ascii data' and 'function' boundary velocity plugins now allow
velocities to be specified along spherical (up, east, north) unit vectors. - New: Added a visualization plugin that directly outputs the strain rate tensor.
- New: ASPECT can now call PerpleX to calculate material properties, phase
amounts and compositions on-the-fly. This model is provided as a
proof-of-concept; more efficient procedures are required for production runs. - New: ASPECT now outputs a dynamically generated URL based on used features to
ask people to cite appropriate papers. - New: ASPECT has two visualization postprocessors which calculate and output
the grain lag angle and the infinite strain axis (ISA) rotation timescale,
respectively. These two quantities can be used to calculate the grain
orientation lag parameter of Kaminski and Ribe (G3, 2002). - Improved: The artificial diffusion term that is added in the entropy
viscosity method to the temperature and composition equations is now computed
as the maximum of the physical diffusion and entropy viscosity instead of the
sum. This reduces numerical diffusion for the temperature field. - New: Compositional fields can now be prescribed to a value that is computed
in the material model as an additional output at every time step. - Changed: The heat flux through boundary cells is now computed using the
consistent boundary flux method as described in Gresho, et al. (1987), which
is much more accurate than the previously used method. - New: ASPECT can now calculate gravity anomalies in addition to the geoid.
- New: ASPECT now outputs a file named original.prm in the output directory
with the exact content of the parameter it got started with. - New: Added basic support for a volume-of-fluid interface tracking advection
method in 2D incompressible box models. The VoF method is an efficient method
to track a distinct compositional field without artificial diffusion. - New: There is now an option to output visualization data as higher order
polynomials. This is an improvement in accuracy and requires less disk space
than the 'Interpolate output' option that was available before. However the
new output can only be read by ParaView version 5.5 and newer and is
therefore disabled by default. - New: Several new benchmark cases were added.
- Many other fixes and smaller improvements.
A complete list of changes and their contributing authors can be found at
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/doc/doxygen/changes_between_2_80_80_and_2_81_80.html
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister,
Jacqueline Austermann, Menno Fraters, Anne Glerum, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
ASPECT v2.1.0-rc1
version 2.1.0-rc1
ASPECT v2.0.1
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.0.1. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.0.1
This release is a bugfix release for 2.0.0 and includes the following fixes:
- Fixed: The 'compositional heating' heating plugin had a parameter
'Use compositional field for heat production averaging' that was used
inconsistently with its description. Its first entry did not correspond
to the background field, but to the first compositional field, and the
last value was ignored. This is fixed now, the first entry is used for
the background field, and all following values determine whether to include
the corresponding compositional fields. - Fixed: The 'depth dependent' material model did not properly initialize
the material model it uses as a base model. This caused crashes if the
base model requires an initialization (such as the 'steinberger' material
model). This is fixed now by properly initializing the base model. - Fixed: The advection assembler for DG elements was not thread-safe,
which led to wrong results or crashes if a discontinuous temperature
or composition discretization was combined with multithreading. - Disabled: The particle functionality was not tested when combined with a
free surface boundary, and this combination is currently not supported. This
limitation is now made clear by failing for such setups with a descriptive
error message.
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister,
Jacqueline Austermann, Menno Fraters, Anne Glerum, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
ASPECT v2.0.0
We are pleased to announce the release of ASPECT 2.0.0. ASPECT is the Advanced
Solver for Problems in Earth's ConvecTion. It uses modern numerical methods such
as adaptive mesh refinement, multigrid, and a modular software design to
provide a fast, flexible, and extensible mantle convection solver. ASPECT is
available from
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
and the release is available from
https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/releases/tag/v2.0.0
This release includes the following changes:
- New: Newton solver and defect correction Picard iterations for nonlinear
problems (for the Stokes system) - Melt solver: Overhaul leading to improved performance and stability, better
integration with other plugins - New: Material model with grain size evolution
- New: Boundary temperature plugin with evolving core-mantle boundary
temperature based on the heat flux through the core-mantle boundary - New: ASPECT can now compute the geoid in 3D spherical shell geometry
- New: Operator splitting for reactions between compositional fields
- New: Added a PREM gravity profile
- Improved: Significantly reduced memory consumption in models that use many
compositional fields - Improved: A large number of performance improvements for preconditioners,
assembly, seismic tomography initial conditions, and lateral averaging - Improved: More flexibility for boundary and initial conditions, different
plugins can be combined - Improved: The dynamic topography postprocessor now uses the consistent
boundary flux method for computing surface stresses, which is significantly
more accurate - New: Additional RHS force terms in the Stokes system can be added
- New particle interpolators: nearest neighbor, bilinear least squares,
harmonic average - New: Graphical user interface for the creation and modification of input
parameter files - Many other fixes and small improvements.
- Rework: Updated parameter and section names to make them more consistent and
easier to understand. A script for updating parameter and source files is
provided with the release.
A complete list of changes can be found at
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/doc/doxygen/changes_between_1_85_80_and_2_80_80.html
Wolfgang Bangerth, Juliane Dannberg, Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister,
Jacqueline Austermann, Menno Fraters, Anne Glerum, John Naliboff,
and many other contributors.
v2.0.0-rc1
version 2.0.0-rc1