2023 02 27 Open NEST Developer Video Conference
- Welcome
- 🎉 NEST 3.4 released! 🎉
- Review of NEST User Mailing List
- Project team round
- In-depth discussion
Here we discuss topics that need broader attention, for example questions that came up but are outside a single project's scope, larger planned changes/PRs that affect all teams or pending work that is blocked by external factors.
- Models / NESTML
- NESTML release coming very soon
- working on CI process
- NEST GPU
- working on Cython bindings
- PyNEST
- separate discussion scheduled on Friday about linker problems
- mpi tests now movable to Python
- NEST Desktop
- Next release planned in the coming days!
- Kernel
- see in-depth #2617
- Installation
- assertions vs.
NDEBUGvs."build_type=release" - Work on MacOS #2197 interaction required
- assertions vs.
- Infrastructure
- installation on HPC sites ongoing
- Documentation
- work as usual
- EBRAINS
- Release 2023.03 upcoming.
- Testing
- next hackathon: convert SLI tests
Planning weekly meeting for Cleaning up Python tests: Friday afternoons -> announcement coming.
An overview and a brief tour through the tutorials of NEAT.
Q&A
- Are other simulators possible? Arbor, Neuron? – Not at the moment, since many specializations for NEST are implemented.
- Why "Analysis Toolkit" and not "Modeling"? – Many modeling functions actually analyze and simplify the tree. The implementation in NEST is then based on this analysis.
Injector neuron naming (#2622 @nicolossus)
- Currently spike generators duplicated on all threads
- Behavior of spike generators in some models is much more like neurons
- #2622 would add a neuron model that behaves like a spike generator
Question: What to name the new neuron model?
- Comment: "ignore_and_fire" neuron exists for very specific benchmark purpose, maybe align naming. "periodic" vs. "prescribed" timing.
- "Injector" instead of neuron could be confused with current injection.
- "ignore" input is different from "not connectable"
- ignore_and_fire is connectable and runs all synapse mechanics, just the output is not dependent on this.
- spike_generator type-of-neuron would not be connectable or would not do anything with incoming spikes
See PR/issue to vote on different parts of the naming.
Integrating "deliver events first" (#2617 @heplesser)
- additional explanation on #2617
- please contact @heplesser if you are interested to join the effort.
