First steps#

Before trying to set up a model to answer your particular research questions, we advise you to get familiar with ASPECT and its functionalities by following these steps:

  1. Watch the CIG ASPECT tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdy04DoEepEyeS_HZwa0Ws0kW5Rs2wsQ6) that will show you how to run ASPECT and construct new setups yourself.

  2. Go through the cookbooks in this manual, see Cookbooks.

  3. Go through the benchmarks in this manual, see Benchmarks.

  4. If you want to use some existing functionality that is not discussed in these resources, search in the extensive tests directory. For example, to search for an initial temperature condition called “spherical gaussian perturbation” while in the ASPECT directory, type:

      grep 'spherical gaussian perturbation' tests/*.prm

    This command will show you all the test input files that use this initial temperature condition. You can also look up any of the parameters used in the input files in this manual.

  5. Have a look at the ASPECT GitHub repository. Here you can see the planned developments (https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/projects/2), current issues that others have reported (https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/issues), and what is currently being worked on (https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pulls).

  6. Have a look at our discussion forum when your model behaves unexpectedly or you need functionality that does not exist yet. The ASPECT community can tell you whether they experienced something similar or are already working on the topic.

  7. If you experience unexpected behavior that you expect is a bug and this problem has not been reported as an issue on GitHub, please create a new issue so that everybody is aware of the potential problem and can think of a fix. When creating a new issue, it is very useful if you can provide a minimum working example, i.e. a small test setup that demonstrates the issue and does not require modifications to the code. You can for example modify one of the existing test input files, which typically take less than a minute to run using only a few cores. The test input file and an image illustrating the problem can be attached to the issue.