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Documentation for ANNarchy#

ANNarchy (Artificial Neural Networks architect) is a neural simulator designed for distributed rate-coded or spiking neural networks. The core of the library is written in C++ and distributed using openMP or CUDA. It provides an interface in Python for the definition of the networks. It is released under the GNU GPL v2 or later.

The source code of ANNarchy is available at:

https://github.com/ANNarchy/ANNarchy

The documentation is at:

https://annarchy.github.io

A forum for discussion is set at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/annarchy

Bug reports should be done through the Issue Tracker of ANNarchy on Github.

Citation

If you use ANNarchy for your research, we would appreciate if you cite the following paper:

Vitay J, Dinkelbach HÜ and Hamker FH (2015). ANNarchy: a code generation approach to neural simulations on parallel hardware. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 9:19. doi:10.3389/fninf.2015.00019

@article{Vitay2015,
  title = {{{ANNarchy}}: A Code Generation Approach to Neural Simulations on Parallel Hardware},
  author = {Vitay, Julien and Dinkelbach, Helge {\"U}. and Hamker, Fred H.},
  year = {2015},
  journal = {Frontiers in Neuroinformatics},
  volume = {9},
  number = {19},
  doi = {10.3389/fninf.2015.00019},
  url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fninf.2015.00019},
  abstract = {Many modern neural simulators focus on the simulation of networks of spiking neurons on parallel hardware. Another important framework in computational neuroscience, rate-coded neural networks, is mostly difficult or impossible to implement using these simulators. We present here the ANNarchy (Artificial Neural Networks architect) neural simulator, which allows to easily define and simulate rate-coded and spiking networks, as well as combinations of both. The interface in Python has been designed to be close to the PyNN interface, while the definition of neuron and synapse models can be specified using an equation-oriented mathematical description similar to the Brian neural simulator. This information is used to generate C++ code that will efficiently perform the simulation on the chosen parallel hardware (multi-core system or graphical processing unit). Several numerical methods are available to transform ordinary differential equations into an efficient C++code. We compare the parallel performance of the simulator to existing solutions.}
}