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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience pp 1849–1852Cite as

NEST: the Neural Simulation Tool

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Synonyms

Neural simulation tool; NEST; SYNOD

Definition

The neural simulation tool NEST is designed for large networks of simple spiking model neurons. NEST includes a wide range of neuron and synapse models and provides high-level commands to create spatially structured networks. NEST is controlled through a Python-based interface and supports parallel simulation. NEST is available from www.nest-initiative.org under a GNU Public License.

Detailed Description

NEST is optimized for networks of neurons whose subthreshold dynamics can be described by a small number of differential equations. By default, NEST simulations operate on a fixed time grid. However, NEST also supports precisely timed spikes (Hanuschkin et al. 2010), combining the precision of event-driven simulators (Henker et al. 2012) with the efficiency of grid-based simulation.

NEST supports hybrid parallelization with MPI processes and multithreading, permitting lightweight thread-only parallelization for small simulations...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 5003, 1432, Ås, Norway

    Hans Ekkehard Plesser

  2. Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6), Computational and Systems Neuroscience, Jülich Research Centre, Jülich, Germany

    Hans Ekkehard Plesser & Abigail Morrison

  3. Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6) and Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6), Jülich Research Centre and JARA, Jülich, Germany

    Markus Diesmann

  4. Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Markus Diesmann

  5. Blue Brain Project, École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Marc-Oliver Gewaltig

  6. Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience – Bernstein Facility for Simulation and Database Technology, Institute for Advanced Simulation, Jülich Aachen Research Alliance, Jülich Research Centre, Jülich, Germany

    Abigail Morrison

  7. Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Abigail Morrison

Authors
  1. Hans Ekkehard Plesser
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  2. Markus Diesmann
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  3. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig
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  4. Abigail Morrison
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hans Ekkehard Plesser .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Ranu Jung

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© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Cite this entry

Plesser, H.E., Diesmann, M., Gewaltig, MO., Morrison, A. (2015). NEST: the Neural Simulation Tool. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_258

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