3.2 Virtual Machine

3.2.1 Installing VM software and setting up the virtual machine

The ASPECT project provides an experimental virtual machine containing a fully configured version of ASPECT. To use this machine, you will need to install VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) on your machine, and then import a virtual machine image that can be downloaded from http://www.math.clemson.edu/~heister/dealvm/. Note, however, that the machine image is several gigabytes in size and downloading will take a while. After downloading and installing the virtual image it is convenient to set up a shared folder between your host system and the virtual machine to exchange model files and outputs.

3.2.2 Running ASPECT models

The internal setup of the virtual machine is similar to the Docker container discussed above, except that it contains a full-featured desktop environment. Also note that the user name is ubuntu, not dealii as in the Docker container. Again there are multiple ways to use the virtual machine, but we recommend the following workflow:

1. Create your ASPECT input file in the shared folder and start the virtual machine.
2. Navigate in a terminal to your model directory.
3. Run your model using the provided ASPECT executable:
   ~/aspect/aspect your_input_file.prm
4. The model output should automatically appear on your host machine in the shared directory.
5. After you have verified that your model setup is correct, you might want to consider recompiling ASPECT in release mode to increase the speed of the computation. See Section 4.3 for a discussion of debug and release mode.
6. Visualize your model output either inside of the virtual machine (ParaView and VisIt are pre-installed), or outside on your host system.

You are all set. Repeat steps 1-6 of this process as necessary when updating your model parameters.