Single Neuron Introduction

Installation and Usage

To set up the application, run the following from this folder:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

Afterwards you can execute the program by executing ./simple

Here, the <platform> can be substituted by all platforms currently supported by Cypress. This list contains SpiNNaker, Spikey, BrainScaleS (and its executable system specification) and nest/pynn.nest. Note that the respective backend has to be installed on your system.

Neuron Parameters and weights are defined in the config, see config/parameters.json. This is currently hard-coded -- sorry for that.

To install a backend (nest) into a virtual environment, execute ./virtualenvs.sh in the source directory. To activate the virtual environment with the nest installation, type source ~/venvs/nest/bin/activate.

Optional bash alias

On the long term, it is easier to define an alias in your ~/.bashrc. Here is my configuration (replace USER by your username):

if [ -e /home/USER/venvs/nest/bin/activate ]; then
        alias nest="\
        (export \
                VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT=1\
                PS1='\[\e[0;1;38;5;106m\]\[\e[48;5;236m\] NEST \[\e[0m\] \w> '; \
        source /home/USER/venvs/nest/bin/activate; history -a; bash --norc --noprofile)"
fi

From now on you can enter the virtual environment by just typing nest and exit it again with exit.