Connectionists: NEST 2.16.0 released

[Hans Ekkehard Plesser]

Dear colleagues!

I am very excited to inform you that we have released version 2.16.0 of NEST, the Neural Simulation Tool, today. 

NEST 2.16.0 is the result of 89 merged pull requests by 39 developers since we released NEST 2.14.0 in October 2017.

Most notably, this release includes a new infrastructure for the storage of connections, which reduces the memory consumption and network build times (Jordan et al., 2018) and extends the rate model framework for novel use-cases (Senden et al., 2018). As usual, it also includes numerous bug fixes and minor improvements. At the same time, the we have tried to minimize changes to the user interface, so scripts that worked with NEST 2.14.0 should work with NEST 2.16.0 as well. One exception is that global spike detectors have been removed, but this should be relevant only for users on petascale machines. For a detailed list of changes, please see

	https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator/releases/tag/v2.16.0

The citation for NEST 2.16.0 is

	Linssen, Charl, Lepperød, Mikkel Elle, Mitchell, Jessica, Pronold, Jari, Eppler, Jochen Martin, Keup, Chrisitan, … Plesser, Hans Ekkehard. (2018, August 27). NEST 2.16.0 (Version 2.16.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1400175

We would like to encourage you to switch to NEST 2.16.0 as soon as possible and are looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

On behalf of the NEST Initiative, I would like to thank all developers who have contributed to NEST 2.16.0 and especially our release managers Dennis Terhorst and Jochen Eppler for wrapping it all up!

Best regards,
Hans Ekkehard Plesser
President, The NEST Initiative


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Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser
Associate Professor

Faculty of Science and Technology
Norwegian University of Life Sciences
PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway

Phone +47 6723 1560
Email hans.ekkehard.plesser at nmbu.no
Home  http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser