NEST 3.2

NEST 3.2 is the result of 959 commits by 22 developers since NEST 3.1 which was released on 2021-09-15.

This release mainly contains smaller bug fixes and improvements. Most development work went into improving support for new language features in Python and C++ and updating the setups for Python packaging.

Addendum: When installing this release from source, please apply the patch-file attached to these release notes. Download the file to the source directory of NEST, then run patch -p1 < nest-simulator-3.2-p1-VersionNumber.patch. This fixes the version number reported by PyNEST.

Enhancements

• Fall back to CMake's Development package for Python in case of errors
• Add STDP synapse unit testing
• Implement hover tooltips in documentation
• Link to Zenodo citation page in docs
• Implement version role for Sphinx
• Handle empty and non-absolute installation prefixes
• Update nest-server command
• Update documentation and refactor comments in iaf_psc_exp current input
• Add connectivity diagram to hpc_benchmark documentation

Bug fixes

• Distribute node positions over MPI processes
• Fix version warning in documentation
• Fix compiler warning issued by newest Clang
• Fix quirks with import machinery in Python 3.8
• Fix container access in corner cases and add _GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS checks to all test configurations
• Tidy up SLI startup, especially opening of sli-init.sli
• Properly import missing functions in PyNEST hl_api
• Attribute assignment safeguards for NestModule and SynapseCollection
• Remove erroneous check in stimulation device base class

Maintenance

• Use Development.Module to be compatible with static Python interpreter
• Fix broken links on the download page
• Fix failing Read the docs build
• Update links for live media image
• Add warning to installation docs about Conda package
• Concise and static Python imports
• Remove ConnPlotter from the NEST code base
• Update security support for 3.x releases
• Make volume transmitter inherit from Node instead of ArchivingNode
• Make reference guide and NEST 3 features more visible on Read the Docs
• Restructure CI pipeline configuration
• Fix Clang warnings
• Update outdated code snippets in documentation
• Change internal links to ref role in user documentation
• Add additional reference to Izhikevich model documentation
• Fix typo in hpc_benchmark
• Removed object base from class argument lists
• Remove unused parameter from STDP unit test
• Fix Python codestyle
• Remove some merge conflict artifacts
• Bump sphinx version to >=4.0.2 to remove jinja<3 requirement
• Restructure cmake_options.rst
• Format error messages in jonke_synapse and stdp_dopamine_synapse
• Update clang-format to version 9
• Clean up Sphinx warnings related to models
• Enhance and clean up model documentation
• Fix path to connection diagram for HPC benchmark example
• Explicitly use nest namespace to avoid compiler confusion
• More detailed explanation of why C++ ADL requires nest::apply()
• Fix file formatting error
• Update version in conf.py
• Fix PEP8 errors in doc helper files
• Clean up OpenMP pragmas
• Fix version warning