A General Neural Simulation System for Computational Neurobiology

本项目是对通用神经仿真系统GENESIS （GEneral neural simulation System）的综合性重新设计。GENESIS最初是作为P.I.的一部分开发的他正在努力建立现实的神经系统模型。GENESIS已提供给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社区的重要工具。GENESIS项目的总体设计目标是为神经生物学家提供一个强大的模拟神经生物学系统的工具，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。这包括在线服务、文档的持续开发、错误修复以及促进GENESIS用户和GENESIS开发人员之间的协作。我们活动的第二个重点将是重新设计创世纪本身。该项目的基本软件设计自1986年开始以来没有发生实质性的变化。现在是彻底重新设计GENESIS的时候了，以提供更有效的跨平台可移植性、自由的可扩展性和代码交换、灵活地处理缺失的参数和分区，并提供沿多个轴的粒度。实现这些目标应该会产生一个更有用、更容易联合的系统，扩展和维护的成本要低得多。重新设计是从首先采用并行系统的观点开始的，而不是从顺序平台开始，然后再分离到并行。这项工作是由计算神经科学项目和神经科学集群（都在生物）支持的。这项工作将集中在对并行架构和新图形语言的支持上。

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.