What is NEOSIM?

Neosim is a framework to support large scale multi-level modelling of the nervous system. It: This early release of the Neosim development kit is intended to help simulation software developers to start developing modules for Neosim. It includes a Java discrete event simulation kernel which can run on single processors, multiprocessors using threading, and networked workstations using Remote Method Invocation, Java's object oriented communications layer.

A future development kit will be released with a higher performance C++ simulation kernel, for pushing the limits of simulation scale and speed. Currently Java optimising compilers can produce code speeds comparable (and in some cases better than) optimised C and Fortran code, but since C and C++ compiler technology is more mature, it is still likely to have the edge over Java for the time being.

NEOSIM concepts

The Neosim kernel provides just the basic support necessary for building and running large simulation models. All the interesting behaviour of model components is provided by plug-in modules. These modules are intended to be developed independently by different groups, and can communicate with each other using the kernel interface. For example, a model could be built using a visualisation component written in one lab, a neuron simulation component from the NEURON simulator, another from the GENESIS simulator and a number of home grown Java or C++ components.

When (and if) the time comes to scale up a model to more realistic sizes, the neosim kernel will support the distribution of the model onto multiprocessors, networked workstations or parallel machines without having to modify the model description. This last point is crucial, as previous parallel simulation tools (such as PGENESIS) required the model to become a parallel program, with all the associated programming problems that entails.

This "transparent parallelism" is possible if the model is specified as a number of entities which communicate using events. In fact there is an enormous amount of available parallelism in a neuronal network model, since each neuron is an independent computational unit which communicates using spikes, and could theoretically run on its own processor. In practice there is usually more parallelism available than needs to be exploited, and parallel implementations partition a model to give some fraction of the total number of neurons to each processor.

So, how is a model specified?

NEOSIM provides a number of basic classes which are extended to provide particular behaviours.

The place of XML in the framework

NEOSIM models can be built using a programming language such as Java or C++ - or a script language using a script interpreter module, and this is the way in which models have been constructed in the past. For many modelling projects this is the most appropriate technique, as it allows maximal flexibility. The price paid is that it can be hard for people to reuse models described in this way, as one has to understand someone else's code.

One way to encouraging reuse of models and components is to use a declarative description format for the parts of models which can be considered "data". Any ASCII format could be used for this; XML is becoming increasingly popular as a format for self-describing structured data. It is human-readable, essentially like HTML with user-defined tags, and is becoming more important as an interchange format between programs.

The aim

A major aim of this modelling framework is to allow anyone to repeat a simulation model run given just an XML model file. This currently works for models specified entirely using Java - the XML file can pull in any additional code modules required to run the simulation. For mixed C++/Java models the installation is more involved and site-specific.


Fred Howell
Last modified: Fri Nov 3 16:06:34 GMT 2000