Simulation of large spiking neural networks on distributed architectures, the "DAMNED" simulator

Abstract

This paper presents a spiking neural network simulator suitable for biologically plausible large neural networks, named DAMNED for "Distributed And Multi-threaded Neural Event-Driven". The simulator is designed to run efficiently on a variety of hardware. DAMNED makes use of multi-threaded programming and non-blocking communications in order to optimize communications and computations overlap. This paper details the even-driven architecture of the simulator. Some original contributions are presented, such as the handling of a distributed virtual clock and an efficient circular event queue taking into account spike propagation delays. DAMNED is evaluated on a cluster of computers for networks from 103 to 105 neurons. Simulation and network creation speedups are presented. Finally, scalability is discussed regarding number of processors, network size and activity of the simulated NN. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.