brian2cuda

Please note that this package is still under developement and has not been released yet.

Brian2cuda is an extention of the spiking neural network simulator Brian2, implementing a Brian2 standalone device to generate C++/CUDA code to run simluations on NVIDIA general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs).

Usage:

Use your Brian2 code (see Brian2 documentation) and modify the imports to:

from brian2 import *
import brian2cuda
set_device("cuda_standalone")

Installation

Requirements

• Python2: Python3 is not supported yet. Please use Python 2 (development and testing has only been done in Python 2.7 at this stage).
• Brian2: The correct version with which this implementation is working is stored in a submodule in frozen_repos/brian2
• Matplotlib, Seaborn (imports are not fixed yet, so you need these to be able to import brian2cuda at this stage).

After cloning brian2cuda, you can initialise the submodule from inside this repository:

cd brian2cuda
git submodule update --init frozen_repos/brian2

Now you can install the correct Brian2 and brian2cuda versions using pip (Be careful if you already have a Brian2 version installed in your current Python environment!):

pip install .
pip install ./frozen_repos/brian2

Or just add them to your PYTHONPATH (in which case you need to install their dependencies manually).

Comparison with brian2genn

The brian2genn and GeNN versions that can be used with the same brian2 version as brian2cuda are stored in submodules in frozen_repos/brian2genn and frozen_repos/genn. You can initialise them with:

git submodule update --init frozen_repos/brian2genn
git submodule update --init frozen_repos/genn

If you are using LINUX and your CUDA is installed in /usr/local/cuda/, you can now just source init_genn to set the enironmental variables needed for GeNN to work:

source frozen_repos/init_genn

Otherwise modify the CUDA_PATH in init_genn accordingly or follow the instructions from the GeNN repository

Now you can install brian2genn either with pip:

pip install ./frozen_repos/brian2genn

or just add it to your PYTHONPATH.