A General Neural Simulation System for Computational Neurobiology

该项目是对神经模拟工具GENESIS（通用神经模拟系统）的全面重新设计。 GENESIS最初是作为PI的一部分开发的正在努力建立逼真的神经系统模型。 GENESIS已被加州理工学院以外的实验室用于研究和教育，并已成为计算神经科学界的重要工具。 GENESIS项目的总体设计目标是为神经生物学家提供模拟神经生物学系统的强大工具，同时促进不同建模工作之间的相互作用。 我们将专注于两个方面：首先，我们将继续提供持续的用户支持。 这包括联机服务、继续编写文件、修正错误以及促进GENESIS用户之间和GENESIS开发人员之间的合作。 我们活动的第二个主要重点将是重新设计GENESIS本身。 该项目的基本软件设计自1986年开始以来没有实质性变化。 现在是完全重新设计GENESIS的时候了，以提供跨平台的更有效的可移植性、自由的可扩展性和代码交换、灵活性、缺少的参数和分隔，并提供沿沿着多个轴的粒度。 实现这些目标应该会产生一个有用的、更容易的联邦系统，而且扩展和维护成本要低得多。 重新设计首先从并行系统的角度出发，而不是从顺序平台开始，然后再转向并行。 这项工作得到了计算神经科学计划和神经科学集群的支持（全部在生物中）。 这项工作将集中在支持并行架构以及新的图形语言。

This project is the comprehension redesign of the neural simulation toll referred to as GENESIS (GEneral NEural SImulation System). GENESIS was developed initially as part of the P.I.'s ongoing efforts to build realistic models of nervous systems. GENESIS has been made available for use to laboratories outside Caltech for research and education, and has become an important tool for the computational neuroscience community. The overall design objective for the GENESIS project is to provide neurobiologists with a powerful tool for simulating neruobiological systems, while at the same time promoting the interactions between different modeling efforts. We will concentrate on two areas: first we will continue to provide ongoing user support. This includes on-line services, continued development of documentation, bug fixes, and promotion of collaborations between GENESIS users and between GENESIS developers. The second major focus of our activities will be the redesign of GENESIS itself. The basic software design of the project has not changed substantially since its inception in 1986. It is now time to completely redesign GENESIS to provide far more efficient portability across platforms free extensibility and exchange of code, flexibility lump missing parameters and compartments, and provide granularity along multiple axes. Achieving these goals should result in a move useful, more easily federated system which is far less expensive to extend and maintain. The redesign is beginning by first taking a parallel systems view point, rather than starting with a sequential platform and later parting to parallel. This work is supported by the Computational Neuroscience program, and the neuroscience's cluster (all in Bio). This effort will focus on both support for parallel architectures as well as new graphics languages.