Software:About

From NEST

What is NEST?

NEST is a simulation system for large networks of biologically realistic (spiking) neurons. It is best suited for the simulation of large networks of spiking point-neuron models. The internal dynamics of these models may be arbitrarily complex (or simple).

The term point neuron refers to the fact that NEST has no easy way to represent detailed neuronal morphology or geometry. If this is what you want, you may want to use tools like NEURON or GENESIS.

The main focus of NEST simulations is the dynamics and behavior of large networks of neurons. The dynamics of the individual neurons is assumed to be known. While NEST allows you to flexibly design network architectures, it does not provide you with an easy, that is interactive, mechanism to change the internal workings of a neuron model. This has to be done at the C++ level and requires recompilation of NEST.

NEST is a research tool and is designed to be extended in various ways:

Users can add new models of network nodes (e.g. neurons, synapses, and devices).
Users can write libraries of useful programs and routines.
Users can extend the instruction set of the simulation language.

NEST is a command-line application. The user formulates her simulation as a simulation script which is then executed by NEST's simulation language interpreter. The result of a simulation is typically a set of data-files which can then be processed by tools like Matlab, IDL, or Mathematica.

In the days of graphical user interfaces and graphical operating systems, this approach may seem anachronistic. The roots of NEST date back to 1993 when graphical user interfaces were not only highly volatile, but also platform dependent (we are not implying that this is not the case today). So we decided to leave the development of graphical front-ends with the desired analysis capabilities out of the project. We still think it was a wise decision to separate computation from visualization, because today, NEST runs on a large number of different computer architectures and operating systems. System requirements NEST requires an ISO 98 conforming C++ compiler and a moderately complete implementation of the C++ standard library.

The following compilers are known to work: