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  • akuesters's avatar
    Python PR #667 (#668) · fa549238
    akuesters authored and Benjamin Cumming's avatar Benjamin Cumming committed
    First step towards the Python front end.
    
    This commit sets up the structure of the python implementation
    * directory structure
    * git submodule for pybind11
    * best practices for making bindings with pybind11
    * unit testing for the python front end
    
    It implements the following features in the Python front end
    * execution contexts
    * gpu detection
    * thread count detection
    * MPI initialization helpers.
    
    Fixes #667.
    fa549238
index.rst 1.75 KiB

Arbor

https://travis-ci.org/eth-cscs/arbor.svg?branch=master

What is Arbor?

Arbor is a high-performance library for computational neurscience simulations.

The development team is from from high-performance computing (HPC) centers:

  • Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), Jülich and BSC in work package 7.5.4 of the HBP.
  • Aim to prepare neuroscience users for new HPC architectures;

Arbor is designed from the ground up for many core architectures:

  • Written in C++11 and CUDA;
  • Distributed parallelism using MPI;
  • Multithreading with TBB and C++11 threads;
  • Open source and open development;
  • Sound development practices: unit testing, continuous Integration, and validation.

Features

We are actively developing Arbor, improving performance and adding features. Some key features include:

  • Optimized back ends for CUDA, KNL and AVX2 intrinsics.
  • Asynchronous spike exchange that overlaps compute and communication.
  • Efficient sampling of voltage and current on all back ends.
  • Efficient implementation of all features on GPU.
  • Reporting of memory and energy consumption (when available on platform).
  • An API for addition of new cell types, e.g. LIF and Poisson spike generators.
  • Validation tests against numeric/analytic models and NEURON.