IN037-14
ASPECT: The Advanced Solver for Problems in Earth’s Convection - Building a sustainable software and community
Tuesday, 15 December 2020: 09:09
Virtual
Rene Gassmoeller, University of California Davis, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Davis, CA, United States; University of Florida, Department of Geological Sciences, Gainesville, United States, Wolfgang Bangerth, Colorado State University, Department of Mathematics, Fort Collins, CO, United States, Juliane Dannberg, University of Florida, Department of Geological Sciences, Gainesville, FL, United States, Timo Heister, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, United States, Jacqueline Austermann, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, United States, Menno Fraters, UC Davis, Davis, United States, Anne Glerum, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Geodynamic Modeling, Potsdam, Germany and John Naliboff, University of California, Davis, Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG), Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, Davis, CA, United States; New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Earth Sciences, Socorro, CA, United States
Abstract:
Numerical modeling has become one of the standard tools in geodynamics to gain new insights into the dynamics and evolution of the solid Earth and other planets and to test how novel observations fit into our existing understanding of the Earth. Geodynamics employs computational modeling across a broad range of applications, including regional models of surface processes, glacial isostatic adjustment and crustal deformation, melt transport and lithosphere dynamics in inter- or intraplate settings, and global processes like mantle convection and inner core growth. In order to accommodate this range of applications, modeling packages require the knowledge of many disciplines – applied mathematics, computational science, software engineering, high-performance computing, geophysics, geology, mineral physics, thermodynamics, and others. Many codes only cover a part of this broad range, but in the last two decades a small set of software packages have emerged that try to synthesize this collective knowledge into widely applicable toolkits for solid Earth geodynamics.
In this contribution we present ASPECT, one of the standard open-source packages to model deformation of the solid Earth, which allows for the flexible and efficient solution of the applications mentioned above. We will discuss some of ASPECT’s most important features, such as an adaptive and dynamically changing finite-element mesh of higher order elements, a collection of state-of-the-art solvers, a flexible plugin system for equations and user modules, and an extensive collection of benchmarks and example models. We will also highlight the development model that made ASPECT successful, and the practices and policies that we have established in order to make ASPECT’s community diverse, inclusive, and sustainable. A large portion of the interaction with our global community is based around our regular in-person developer and user meetings, which we have now extended by virtual tutorials and virtual hackathons. We will present our experiences with this new form of user and developer engagement and draw some preliminary conclusions for the future of user meetings of scientific software projects.
