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Unverified Commit ddd7896a authored by Benjamin Cumming's avatar Benjamin Cumming Committed by GitHub
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Update docs cell description vs. cell kind justification (#1237)

Fixes #1236
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......@@ -113,16 +113,15 @@ The steps of building a simulation from a recipe are:
.. Note::
An example of how performance considerations impact Arbor's architecture:
you will notice cell kind and cell description are separately added to a recipe.
Consider the following conversation between an Arbor simulation, recipe and hardware back-end:
| Simulator: give me cell 37.
| Recipe: here you go, it's of C++ type s3cr1ts4uc3.
| Simulator: wot? What is the cell kind for cell 37?
| Recipe: it's a foobar.
| Simulator: Okay.
| Cell group implementations: which one of you lot deals with foobars?
| Foobar_GPUFTW_lolz: That'd be me, if we've got GPU enabled.
| Simulator: Okay it's up to you then to deal with this s3cr1ts4uc3 object.
It might seem like overkill to have a separate call that returns the cell
kind, when one could determine the kind by requesting the cell description,
then querying the kind of the result.
Some phases of model construction, however, only require the cell kind, and
not the full cell description, which can be quite expensive to
assemble; for example, a Purkinje cell model can have very complex geometry,
a rich collection of ion channels, and thousands of synapses.
General best practices
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