[Genesis-sim-users] Official PGENESIS 2.4 release and GENESIS 2.4 Update

[Dave B. <db...@Co...>]

I would like to announce the Official Release of PGENESIS 2.4 along with a
significant update to GENESIS 2.4.

GENESIS is implemented with an object-oriented design that groups 
related object
and command definitions into separately compiled libraries. Parallel GENESIS
(PGENESIS) adds a library with a "postmaster" object to the usual usual 
GENESIS
objects and commands. This allows a GENESIS simulation (e. g. a large 
network
model) to be split into many MPI processes that communicate through the
postmaster.

The November 2014 release of GENESIS 2.4 was intended to be the last 
packaged
GENESIS 2 distribution for download from the GENESIS web site
(http://genesis-sim.org/GENESIS). As GENESIS is user-supported, rather than
centrally developed, updates to GENESIS and PGENESIS are now obtained 
from the
Repository for Continued Development of the GENESIS 2.4 Neural Simulator
(https://github.com/genesis-sim/genesis-2.4). The object-oriented design and
organization not only fosters the community development of neural 
models, but of
the simulator itself. This new mutually-developed release of PGENESIS is 
such an
example.

As users have continued to contribute new libraries and improvements, 
there has
been an increased use and extension of GENESIS and PGENESIS for its original
purpose of realistically modeling cortical networks of multicompartmental
neurons on parallel computers. Recent updates to GENESIS and a merge of the
GENESIS/PGENESIS development branch from the U.S. Army Research 
Laboratory have
addressed a number of issues in order to increase its scalability for 
modeling
very large networks on high performance computing resources, allowing 
for models
of millions of neurons.

These improvements have made it necessary for a new release of a combined
package of the May 2019 GENESIS 2.4 Update and the PGENESIS 2.4 Official
Release.  Information about this release and downloads are available 
from the
GENESIS web site (http://genesis-sim.org/GENESIS).

The official release of PGENESIS 2.4 is much improved from the December 2014
preliminary release. Updates of GENESIS since the 2014 release allow the 
fast
"hsolve" solver to be used with new synaptic plasticity models and 
measurements
of cortical field potentials. The efficient delivery of spike events 
when hsolve
is used with large network models results in increases in simulation 
speed by
factors of 10 to 20.

This release of PGENESIS 2.4 is also now available for running large-scale
network simulations on supercomputers at the Neuroscience Gateway Portal
(NSG). For further information, see the https://www.nsgportal.org web page.

Dave Beeman