[Comp-neuro] Brian 1.3: a spiking neural simulator

[Romain Brette]

Brian 1.3: a spiking neural simulator
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http:// www.briansimulator.org

The 1.3 release of Brian is out!

Brian is a simulator for spiking neural networks available on almost all 
platforms. The motivation for this project is that a simulator should 
not only save the time of processors, but also the time of scientists. 
Brian is easy to learn and use, highly flexible and easily extensible. 
The Brian package itself and simulations using it are all written in the 
Python programming language, which is an easy, concise and highly 
developed language with many advanced features and development tools, 
excellent documentation and a large community of users providing support 
and extension packages.

The major change in this version is the addition of the Brian.hears 
package for auditory modelling 
(http://www.briansimulator.org/docs/hears.html). This version also 
includes a toolbox for fitting neural models to electrophysiological 
recordings (which uses the parallel optimization package Playdoh 0.3 
(http://code.google.com/p/playdoh/), remote control of Brian scripts, 
and code generation for C and GPU. There are also a number of other new 
features, bug fixes and improvements.

The web site (http://www.briansimulator.org) contains installation 
instructions and the documentation. Many examples are provided in the 
distribution (don’t forget to download the extras.zip file). There is 
also a public forum where you can ask any questions: 
http://groups.google.fr/group/briansupport

Brian is also available from the NeuroDebian repository: 
http://neuro.debian.net/pkgs/python-brian.html pre-packaged for all 
recent Debian and Ubuntu releases.

Brian is being developed by Romain Brette (romain at briansimulator.org) 
and Dan Goodman (dan at briansimulator.org). This version also includes 
contributions by Bertrand Fontaine, Cyrille Rossant, Victor Benichoux 
and Boris Gourévitch.

Romain Brette
http://audition.ens.fr/brette
romain.brette at ens.fr