Beginner question: error running Blankenbach benchmark, can't find global.h

Hello ASPECT users! This is my first post as a novice user who has just installed & compiled ASPECT and are running the very first tests and benchmarks to get to know the code. My advisor and I are having troubles compiling the Blankenbach benchmark. Running cmake on the plugin directory goes well, but on make, it doesn’t find the include directory. Here’s a log of what we did:

[ $]pwd:
HOME/build/aspect/benchmarks/blankenbach/plugin

[ $]cmake .
– Setting up plugin:
– name
– using ASPECT_DIR /software/spack/0.16/opt/spack/linux-centos7-x86_64/gcc-9.3.0/aspect-2.3.0-dz7nwciiox5qscnibxqsqebrhadrrlju/bin
– in Release mode
– Configuring done
– Generating done
– Build files have been written to: $HOME/build/aspect/benchmarks/blankenbach/plugin

[ $] make
[ 50%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/blankenbach.dir/code.cc.o
$HOME/build/aspect/benchmarks/blankenbach/plugin/code.cc:20:10: fatal error: aspect/global.h: No such file or directory
20 | #include <aspect/global.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/blankenbach.dir/code.cc.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/blankenbach.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

We ran into a similar issue earlier, where when trying execute make in the blankenbach/plugins directory, there was a missing config.h file. We worked around this by installing a different developmental version of ASPECT:

This allowed us to fix the error of the missing config.h file, but now ASPECT is not looking in the correct folder for global.h? Or it’s not being generated in the place that it should?

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for getting in touch. It looks like you are using spack to install ASPECT. Is this done by yourself or is this preinstalled on the system you are on?
Very few of us use ASPECT using spack and we might have a bug in the specification and/or installation of ASPECT there. I created an issue here: spack installation can not compile plugin · Issue #4501 · geodynamics/aspect · GitHub

Can you try to manually compile ASPECT instead? When configuring the plugin with cmake, set Aspect_DIR to the build directory.

Let us know if you need further instructions.