Paper Info
Title
A novel CPU/GPU simulation environment for large-scale biologically realistic neural modeling.
Abstract
Computational Neuroscience is an emerging field that provides unique opportunities to study complex brain structures through realistic neural simulations. However, as biological details are added to models, the execution time for the simulation becomes longer. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are now being utilized to accelerate simulations due to their ability to perform computations in parallel. As such, they have shown significant improvement in execution time compared to Central Processing Units (CPUs). Most neural simulators utilize either multiple CPUs or a single GPU for better performance, but still show limitations in execution time when biological details are not sacrificed. Therefore, we present a novel CPU/GPU simulation environment for large-scale biological networks, the NeoCortical Simulator version 6 (NCS6). NCS6 is a free, open-source, parallelizable, and scalable simulator, designed to run on clusters of multiple machines, potentially with high performance computing devices in each of them. It has built-in leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIE) and Izhikevich (IZH) neuron models, but users also have the capability to design their own plug-in interface for different neuron types as desired. NCS6 is currently able to simulate one million cells and 100 million synapses in quasi real time by distributing data across eight machines with each having two video cards.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.3389/fninf.2013.00019
FRONTIERS IN NEUROINFORMATICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
neocortical simulator (NCS),CPU/GPU simulation,leaky integrate-and-fire neurons,izhikevich neurons,biologically realistic,large-scale modeling
Graphics,Computational neuroscience,Supercomputer,Computer science,CUDA,Biological network,Simula,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Machine learning,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
7
17
0.76
References 
Authors
14
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Roger V. Hoang1325.79
Devyani Tanna2170.76
Laurence C. Jayet Bray3201.86
Sergiu Dascalu436279.10
Frederick C. Harris Jr.554778.86