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Test NEST performance
by 512491013＠qq.com 30 May '22

30 May '22

Dear all, Recently, I've been trying to test NEST's performance(with and without MPI). But with PyNEST, it's hard to do more detailed testing with tools like Gprof. Only some print-time and memory methods can be inserted into the C++ source code for testing. Is there a C++ front-end interface that can call NEST C++ source code for testing? Of course, I used some of Python's performance testing tools, but only to the interface, not C++ in action. I'd appreciate any tips on how to test NEST's performance! Cong

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Open NEST Developer Video Conference Monday May 23 2022 11:30 CEST (UTC+2)
by Dennis Terhorst 22 May '22

22 May '22

Dear NEST Users & Developers! I would like to invite you to our next fortnightly Open NEST Developer Video Conference, tomorrow Monday May 23, 11.30-12.30 CEST (UTC+2). Feel free to join the meeting also if it's just to bring your own questions for direct discussion in the in-depth section. As usual, in the Project team round, a contact person of each team will give a short statement summarizing ongoing work in the team and cross-cutting points that need discussion among the teams. The remainder of the meeting we would go into a more in-depth discussion of topics that came up on the mailing list or that are suggested by the teams. Agenda * Welcome * Review of NEST User Mailing List * Project team round * In-depth discussion The agenda for this meeting is also available online, see https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator/wiki/2022-05-23-Open-NEST-Developer-… Since I will not be available for the meeting, Hans Ekkehard Plesser has kindly agreed to chair the meeting. Looking forward to seeing you again soon! Cheers, Dennis Terhorst ------------------ Log-in information ------------------ We use a virtual conference room provided by DFN (Deutsches Forschungsnetz). You can use the web client to connect. We however encourage everyone to use a headset for better audio quality or even a proper video conferencing system (see below) or software when available. Web client * Visit https://conf.dfn.de/webapp/conference/97938800 * Enter your name and allow your browser to use camera and microphone * The conference does not need a PIN to join, just click join and you're in. In case you see a dfnconf logo and the phrase "Auf den Meetingveranstalter warten", just be patient, the meeting host needs to join first (a voice will tell you). VC system/software How to log in with a video conferencing system, depends on you VC system or software. - Using the H.323 protocol (eg Polycom): vc.dfn.net##97938800 or 194.95.240.2##97938800 - Using the SIP protocol:97938800@vc.dfn.de - By telephone: +49-30-200-97938800 For those who do not have a video conference system or suitable software, Polycom provides a pretty good free app for iOS and Android, so you can join from your tablet (Polycom RealPresence Mobile, available from AppStore/PlayStore). Note that firewalls may interfere with videoconferencing in various and sometimes confusing ways. For more technical information on logging in from various VC systems, please see http://vcc.zih.tu-dresden.de/index.php?linkid=1.1.3.4

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NEST Conference 2022 - Extension of abstract submission deadline
by Hans Ekkehard Plesser 10 May '22

10 May '22

Dear all, The abstract submission deadline for the (virtual) NEST Conference 2022 has been extended to Wednesday, 25 May. We are looking forward to your contributions! The NEST Conference provides an opportunity for the NEST Community to meet, exchange success stories, swap advice, learn about current developments in and around NEST spiking network simulation and its application. This year's conference will again take place as a virtual conference on Thursday/Friday 23/24 June 2022. We are inviting contributions to the conference, including talks, "posters" and workshops on specific topics. Important dates 25 May 2022 — Deadline for submission of contributions 03 June 2022 — Notification of acceptance 17 June 2022 — Registration deadline 23 June 2022 — NEST Conference 2022 starts For more information on how to submit your contribution, register and participate, please visit the conference website https://nest-simulator.org/conference We are looking forward to seeing you all in June! Hans Ekkehard Plesser and the conference organizing committee -- Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Head, Department of Data Science Faculty of Science and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway Phone +47 6723 1560 Email hans.ekkehard.plesser(a)nmbu.no<mailto:hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.no> Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser

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NEST Conference 2022 - Extension of abstract submission deadline
by Hans Ekkehard Plesser 10 May '22

10 May '22

Dear all, The abstract submission deadline for the (virtual) NEST Conference 2022 has been extended to Wednesday, 25 May. We are looking forward to your contributions! The NEST Conference provides an opportunity for the NEST Community to meet, exchange success stories, swap advice, learn about current developments in and around NEST spiking network simulation and its application. This year's conference will again take place as a virtual conference on Thursday/Friday 23/24 June 2022. We are inviting contributions to the conference, including talks, "posters" and workshops on specific topics. Important dates 25 May 2022 — Deadline for submission of contributions 03 June 2022 — Notification of acceptance 17 June 2022 — Registration deadline 23 June 2022 — NEST Conference 2022 starts For more information on how to submit your contribution, register and participate, please visit the conference website https://nest-simulator.org/conference We are looking forward to seeing you all in June! Hans Ekkehard Plesser and the conference organizing committee -- Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Head, Department of Data Science Faculty of Science and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway Phone +47 6723 1560 Email hans.ekkehard.plesser(a)nmbu.no<mailto:hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.no> Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser

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Job opportunity
by Elena Pastorelli 09 May '22

09 May '22

Dear NEST developers, I would like to share with you a job opportunity that could be of interest for the community. APE Lab (Rome, Italy) is looking for a motivated and enthusiast candidate for activities aimed at system software development and application porting on advanced HPC platforms, in the framework of the RED-SEA <https://jobs.dsi.infn.it/borseassegni/pdf/getfile.php?filename=24338.pdf> project. Application submission details <https://jobs.dsi.infn.it/borseassegni/pdf/getfile.php?filename=24338.pdf> here (English version in the second part of the document), deadline: 20/05/2022 APE Lab is a INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physic) initiative started in 1984 with the goal of connecting theoretical physics and technology through the development of custom distributed and parallel computing systems. Since then, APE Lab has generated unique know-how, enabling cutting-edge research in HPC (High Performance Computing) with leading roles in the HPC community. APE Lab has participated in several EU-funded projects, the last of which being RED-SEA. The RED-SEA project prepares a new-generation European Network Interconnect, capable of powering the EU Exascale systems to come, leveraging efficient European interconnect technology (BXI) associated with a standard and mature technology (Ethernet), in full coordination with other EU-funded initiatives. The INFN task in RED-SEA is two-fold: 1. to design and implement the network interface card (APEnetX) based on PCIe interface to communicate with CPU and GPU accelerators, and prototyped exploiting Xilinx Alveo FPGAs. 2. to support the co-design approach for network design activities focusing in particular on NEST application as a benchmark. Job Details Task: contribution to development of scalable network simulator based on Omnet++ framework as well as to the Linux Kernel Driver of the Network Interface Card. Requirements: 24 months of demonstrated experience in software development and knowledge/development of linux kernel driver. Knowledge of simulator architectures, coding and use of MPI framework would be an advantage. Best, Elena Pastorelli -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

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Open NEST Developer Video Conference Monday May 9 2022 11:30 CEST (UTC+2)
by Dennis Terhorst 09 May '22

09 May '22

Dear NEST Users & Developers! I would like to invite you to our next fortnightly Open NEST Developer Video Conference, today Monday May 9, 11.30-12.30 CEST (UTC+2). Feel free to join the meeting also just to bring your own questions for direct discussion in the in-depth section. As usual, in the Project team round, a contact person of each team will give a short statement summarizing ongoing work in the team and cross-cutting points that need discussion among the teams. The remainder of the meeting we would go into a more in-depth discussion of topics that came up on the mailing list or that are suggested by the teams. Agenda * Welcome * Review of NEST User Mailing List * Project team round * In-depth discussion The agenda for this meeting is also available online, see https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator/wiki/2022-05-09-Open-NEST-Developer-… Looking forward to seeing you soon! Cheers, Dennis Terhorst ------------------ Log-in information ------------------ We use a virtual conference room provided by DFN (Deutsches Forschungsnetz). You can use the web client to connect. We however encourage everyone to use a headset for better audio quality or even a proper video conferencing system (see below) or software when available. Web client * Visit https://conf.dfn.de/webapp/conference/97938800 * Enter your name and allow your browser to use camera and microphone * The conference does not need a PIN to join, just click join and you're in. In case you see a dfnconf logo and the phrase "Auf den Meetingveranstalter warten", just be patient, the meeting host needs to join first (a voice will tell you). VC system/software How to log in with a video conferencing system, depends on you VC system or software. - Using the H.323 protocol (eg Polycom): vc.dfn.net##97938800 or 194.95.240.2##97938800 - Using the SIP protocol:97938800@vc.dfn.de - By telephone: +49-30-200-97938800 For those who do not have a video conference system or suitable software, Polycom provides a pretty good free app for iOS and Android, so you can join from your tablet (Polycom RealPresence Mobile, available from AppStore/PlayStore). Note that firewalls may interfere with videoconferencing in various and sometimes confusing ways. For more technical information on logging in from various VC systems, please see http://vcc.zih.tu-dresden.de/index.php?linkid=1.1.3.4

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NEST Conference 2022 — Abstract submission deadline Wednesday 11 May
by Hans Ekkehard Plesser 04 May '22

04 May '22

Dear Colleagues, I would like to remind you that the deadline for abstract submission to the virtual NEST Conference 2022 is approaching fast: You have until next Wednesday, 11 May 2022, to submit your contribution (talk, "poster", or workshop) via the conference website https://nest-simulator.org/conference. The NEST Conference provides an opportunity for the NEST Community to meet, exchange success stories, swap advice, learn about current developments in and around NEST spiking network simulation and its application. We explicitly encourage young scientists to participate in the conference! This year's conference will again take place as a virtual conference on Thursday/Friday 23/24 June 2022. Important dates 11 May 2022 - Deadline for submission of contributions 03 June 2022 - Notification of acceptance 17 June 2022 - Registration deadline 23 June 2022 - NEST Conference 2022 starts We are looking forward to seeing you all in June! Hans Ekkehard Plesser and the conference organizing committee -- Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Head, Department of Data Science Faculty of Science and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway Phone +47 6723 1560 Email hans.ekkehard.plesser(a)nmbu.no<mailto:hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.no> Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser

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problems with step_current_generator parallelization
by Jan Střeleček 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Dear NEST developers, In our group, we're working on a model of the primary visual cortex and use step_current_source generators to simulate the input current of the LGN neurons. We noticed that the simulation time of our model was very sensitive to the number of step_current_sources. When trying to narrow down the cause, we found out that this might be due to an issue with the parallelization of the step_current_source_generators. The resulting simple system in which the problem can be observed is attached below, simple_example.py. It essentially creates NSstep_current_generators and injects them into NLneurons with fixed indegree. The iaf_cond_exp neuron model is used here. The increment in the number of step_current sources does not benefit from a multithreading performance boost as one would expect. This is compared to the performance boost for the number of neurons; see the technical details below. Our estimated guess is that the difference between 1 and 32 threads is 10 to 20 times slower than the parallelization suggests. Technical details: The relative slowdown due to the parallelization of step_current_sources was measured using linear regression over simulation time = a NL + b NS. See slowdown_example.png. The ratio b/a was then calculated. This ratio was then measured in dependence on the number of threads. A bigger difference between the ratio for 1 thread and 32 threads means a greater problem in parallelization in step_current_generators. Some additional results: - interval_dependence.png - the slowdown does not depend on amplitude_times in the step_current_source function - indegree_dependence.png - the slowdown depends on the indegree of nest.Connect(source, neurons). Specifically, the slowdown is worse for low indegree values. This shows the slowdown depends on the number of step_current_sources created, not on the injections themselves. Are you aware of some lack of parallelization of the step_current_source or current the injection itself? If so, are there any plans for improving it? best regards, Jan Střeleček

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Tsodyks model, examples, burst generation
by Dennis Terhorst 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Dear all, in the past weeks there was some on- and off-list discussion around the Tsodyks models and examples in NEST and I want to put some files out here that might be interesting for more people. Around 2019 we were trying to port some old scripts to more recent versions of NEST and did some basic plots. There are descriptions and PyNEST examples available in the docs Model Directory [1, 2, 3], and the example Notebook in the docs runs with NEST 3.x. Additionally the short-term burst behavior can be reproduced with the attached scripts (taken from the pre-3.x repository and updated to 3.x syntax, still a bit untidy), but to my knowledge this was not yet transferred into a PyNEST version. There has also been some discussion on the mailing list some time ago [4], but I couldn't find any results that have surfaced on the list here, though I know of some work going on in this direction in different groups. It would be interesting to hear about your perspective and see where we can combine experience! best, Dennis [1]: https://nest-simulator.readthedocs.io/en/v3.3/models/index.html#short-term-… [2]: https://nest-simulator.readthedocs.io/en/v3.3/models/tsodyks_synapse.html [3]: https://nest-simulator.readthedocs.io/en/v3.3/models/tsodyks2_synapse.html [4]: https://nest-simulator.org/mailinglist/hyperkitty/list/users@nest-simulator… -- Dipl.-Phys. Dennis Terhorst Coordinator Software Development Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6) Computational and Systems Neuroscience & Theoretical Neuroscience, Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6) Jülich Research Centre, Member of the Helmholz Association and JARA 52425 Jülich, Germany Building 15.22 Room 4004 Phone +49 2461 61-85062 Fax +49 2461 61- 9460 d.terhorst(a)fz-juelich.de

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Any objections to renaming hh_cond_*_traub models?
by Hans Ekkehard Plesser 25 Apr '22

25 Apr '22

Dear NEST Users, As discussed a long time ago (see towards the end of the discussion in https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator/issues/329), the hh_cond_exp_traub model included in NEST is far from the model by Traub and Miles (1991) which inspired it. The model in NEST was implemented as part of the work on the Brette et al (2007) review paper. I am considering to create a pull request that will 1. rename the models to hh_brette_2007* in keeping with NEST naming guidelines for paper-specific models 2. change the threshold parameter V_T to be the actual threshold for spike emission (currently the criterium is V_m >= V_T + 30 and falling V_m) I was therefore wondering if anyone of you 1. uses the hh_cond_* models at all 2. would object to those changes? Depending on whether the models are being used or not, I'd either implement the renaming via deprecation or directly. Best, Hans Ekkehard -- Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Head, Department of Data Science Faculty of Science and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway Phone +47 6723 1560 Email hans.ekkehard.plesser(a)nmbu.no<mailto:hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.no> Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser

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