GEneral NEural SImulation System 2.2.1 review

GENESIS (short for GEneral NEural SImulation System) is a general purpose simulation platform that was developed to support the simul

License: BSD License File size: 7717K Developer: Genesis Development Team

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GENESIS (short for GEneral NEural SImulation System) is a general purpose simulation platform that was developed to support the simulation of neural systems ranging from subcellular components and biochemical reactions to complex models of single neurons, simulations of large networks, and systems-level models.

GENESIS has provided the basis for laboratory courses in neural simulation at Caltech, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Crete, Trieste, Bangalore, and Obidos short courses in Computational Neuroscience, and at least 49 universities of which we are aware.

Most current GENESIS applications involve realistic simulations of biological neural systems. Although the software can also model more abstract networks, other simulators are more suitable for backpropagation and similar connectionist modeling.

Installation

1. Pick the place where you want to install the "genesis" directory tree. If you are making a system-wide installation as "root" user, /usr/local is a good choice. For a personal installation, without root privileges, you can use your home directory ("~"). Change to this directory and extract the genesis directory from the archive file genesis2.2.1-linux-bin.tar.gz. For example,

cd /usr/local
tar xvzf /mnt/cdrom/genesis2.2.1-linux-bin.tar.gz

or from wherever you have it (e.g.~/downloads/genesis2.2.1-linux-bin.tar.gz).

2. Change to the "genesis" directory and run the setup script that creates the ".simrc" GENESIS initialization file". Then copy .simrc to your home directory.

cd genesis
./binsetup
cp .simrc ~

3. Finallly, add the genesis directory to your search path, so that "genesis" can be found from any directory that you are in. If your login shell is bash, you can do this by editing the .bashrc file in your home directory to add the line

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/genesis

at the end of the file. If you are using tcsh or csh as your command shell, add

set path=($path /usr/local/genesis)

to your .tcsh or .csh file.

At this point, you are ready to try running GENESIS. Change into the directory genesis/Scripts and try some of the tutorials suggested in the README file.