What’s new in NEST 3.8

This page contains a summary of important breaking and non-breaking changes from NEST 3.7 to NEST 3.8. In addition to the release notes on GitHub, this page also contains transition information that helps you to update your simulation scripts when you come from an older version of NEST.

If you transition from an earlier version, please see our extensive transition guide from NEST 2.x to 3.0 and the list of updates for previous releases in the 3.x series.

NMDA dynamics after Brunel and Wang (2001)

A new integrate-and-fire model allows for the use simplified NMDA dynamics. It contains exponential conductance-based AMPA and GABA synapses along with NMDA synapses weighted such that it approximates the original linear dynamics.

For futher information see:

• Decision making in recurrent network with NMDA-dynamics

• iaf_bw_2001 – Leaky integrate-and-fire-neuron model with conductance-based synapses and additional NMDA receptors with simplified dynamics.

• iaf_bw_2001_exact – Leaky integrate-and-fire-neuron model with conductance-based synapses and additional NMDA receptors.

New “How NEST works” diagram for docs

The main page of the docs now contains a diagram highlighting the fundamental components of creating network simulations in NEST.

• Welcome to the NEST Simulator documentation!

NEST performance benchmarks

You can now view results of this release in benchmarks of strong and weak scaling at various network sizes in our docs.

• NEST performance benchmarks