Connectionists: Realistic Neural Modeling Tutorials available

[Dave Beeman]

A new version of the GENESIS Neural Modeling Tutorials package is now
available for viewing or downloading from the web site for the GENESIS
neural simulator, http://www.genesis-sim.org/GENESIS/.  These are an
evolving package of HTML tutorials intended to teach the process of
constructing biologically realistic neural models with the GENESIS
simulator.

The Introduction to Realistic Neural Modeling is a general overview and
introduction to compartmental cell modeling and realistic network
simulation for the beginner.  Although examples are drawn from GENESIS
simulations, the tutorial emphasizes the general modeling approach, rather
than the details of using any particular simulator.  The main tutorial of
the package, the GENESIS Modeling Tutorial, is a multi-part tutorial on
creating realistic cell and network models with GENESIS, and makes use of
provided example simulation scripts to help the user quickly get to the
stage of building large network models.

The latest release of GENESIS (ver. 2.3, March 2006), is also available for
download.  The new version has a number of changes in the simulator source
code to allow use on a greater variety of platforms, including Intel and
AMD 64 bit processors, most varieties of Linux and UNIX, MacIntosh with
OS/X, and Microsoft Windows with the Cygwin environment. It includes
updated versions of Kinetikit (for modeling biochemical reactions) and the
Purkinje cell tutorial, some new simulation objects and enhancements of
existing ones, plus revised and updated documentation.

The latest version of Parallel GENESIS (PGENESIS 2.3) is also available.
PGENESIS is an extension to GENESIS for parallel hardware.  It supports
both running simulations of large networks on multiple processors, and
running many simulations concurrently (e.g., for parameter searching).  It
should run on almost any parallel cluster, SMP, supercomputer, or network
of workstations where MPI and/or PVM is supported, and on which serial
GENESIS itself is runnable.

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Prof. David Beeman, GENESIS Users Group - email: genesis at genesis-sim.org
GENESIS WWW site: http://www.genesis-sim.org/GENESIS/
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