Making ASPECT run faster

When developing ASPECT, we are guided by the principle that the default for all settings should be safe. In particular, this means that you should get errors when something goes wrong, the program should not let you choose an input file parameter so that it doesn’t make any sense, and we should solve the equations to best ability without cutting corners. The goal is that when you start working with ASPECT that we give you the best answer we can. The downside is that this also makes ASPECT run slower than may be possible. This section describes ways of making ASPECT run faster - assuming that you know what you are doing and are making conscious decisions.

• Debug vs. optimized mode
• Adjusting solver tolerances
• Adjusting solver preconditioner tolerances
• Using lower order elements for the temperature/compositional discretization
• Limiting postprocessing
• Switching off pressure normalization
• Regularizing models with large coefficient variation
• Using multithreading