About Us

From NEST

The Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) Initiative was founded in 2001 with the goal to collaborate in the development of simulation methods for biologically realistic neuronal networks.

The main goals of the collaboration are:

Development of new simulation methods and algorithms.
Development of new analysis and visualization tools.
Collection of information and resources related to neural simulations.

These goals are expressed in the joint development of a simulation system for biologically realistic neuronal networks. It is an explicit goal of the NEST Initiative to share its results with the scientific community. This includes

publication of results in appropriate scientific journals, and
releases of simulation tools to the scientific community (for non-commercial use).

The collaboration is based on the idea of mutual benefit, with each party having the same rights (and duties) with respect to the other parties of the collaboration.

[edit]

What we do

[edit]

The NEST Simulator

The NEST initiative develops the NEST Simulator and releases it to the scientific community under the NEST License.

NEST 2.0 beta is now available for download. It includes efficient parallel and distributed simulation and a new Python based user interface.

If you are looking for a general overview over the features of NEST, please read our Scholarpedia entry.

[edit]

General neuronal network modeling methodology

The NEST initiative promotes the development of methods for simulation studies of neuronal networks. We are pleased to announce the publication of

Nordlie E, Gewaltig M-O, Plesser HE (2009). Towards reproducible descriptions of neuronal network models. PLoS Comput Biol 5(8):e1000456.

The NEST initiative would like to encourage scientists in the field to follow the Good model description practice suggested in this paper, and to adopt the Model Description Tables proposed in it. You may download the LaTeX source code for one of the tables here.

Nordlie E, Plesser HE (2009). Visualizing neuronal network connectivity with connectivity pattern tables. Front Neuroinform 3:39.

You can download the ConnPlotter package, which generates connectivity pattern tables from NEST Topology network specifications [1]. ConnPlotter is released under GPL v.3.

[edit]

How to cite NEST

Please cite NEST as: Gewaltig M-O & Diesmann M (2007) NEST (Neural Simulation Tool) Scholarpedia 2(4):1430. Here is a suitable BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE{Gewaltig:NEST,
  author = {Marc-Oliver Gewaltig and Markus Diesmann},
  title = {NEST (NEural Simulation Tool)},
  journal = {Scholarpedia},
  year = {2007},
  volume = {2},
  pages = {1430},
  number = {4}
}

Please also tell us about your publications that used NEST, by using our contact form or sending the reference and maybe even a reprint to info at nest-initiative dot org. We will add them to our publication list.

[edit]