This repository accompanies the NEST tutorial at the EITN Fall School in Computational Neuroscience 2024. Here you can find the presentation slides, Jupyter notebooks and other materials.
During the hands-on part of the tutorial, we will (hopefully be able to) use the EBRAINS platform. To get started, simply check out this repository on EBRAINS and select the latest stable kernel 24.04.
Complete documentation for NEST and NESTML can be found here and here, including installation instructions for different platforms.
While it's possible to use the EBRAINS platform in principle, it is strongly recommended that you install them locally to avoid restrictions on the computational resources.
We recommend either NEST 3.7 with NESTML 7.0.2 for a stable combination, or cloning the respective repositories from GitHub (https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator and https://github.com/nest/nestml) for the current development versions (master branch).
Note that NESTML is required only for some parts of the project, so you can delay its installation until (and if) is needed.
For cross-platform solutions, use the Docker or virtual machine images from the website. On Linux and MacOS, in addition to installing via the package manager, there's also the option of install from source by compiling the code yourself (it's not that complicated, see here) in a conda environment.
Python versions: try to use 3.10 or 3.11 (3.12 is not officially supported yet, but it may still work).
b.zajzon at fz-juelich.de