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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Establishing a novel modeling tool: a python-based interface for a neuromorphic hardware system

Daniel Brüderle^1*, Eric Müller¹, Andrew Davison², Eilif Muller³, Johannes Schemmel¹ and Karlheinz Meier¹

Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

Unité de Neurosciences Intégratives et Computationnelles, CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France

Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Neuromorphic hardware systems provide new possibilities for the neuroscience modeling community. Due to the intrinsic parallelism of the micro-electronic emulation of neural computation, such models are highly scalable without a loss of speed. However, the communities of software simulator users and neuromorphic engineering in neuroscience are rather disjoint. We present a software concept that provides the possibility to establish such hardware devices as valuable modeling tools. It is based on the integration of the hardware interface into a simulator-independent language which allows for unified experiment descriptions that can be run on various simulation platforms without modification, implying experiment portability and a huge simplification of the quantitative comparison of hardware and simulator results. We introduce an accelerated neuromorphic hardware device and describe the implementation of the proposed concept for this system. An example setup and results acquired by utilizing both the hardware system and a software simulator are demonstrated.

Keywords:

neuromorphic, VLSI, hardware, software, modeling, computational neuroscience, Python, PyNN

Citation:

Brüderle D, Müller E, Davison A, Muller E, Schemmel J and Meier K (2009). Establishing a novel modeling tool: a python-based interface for a neuromorphic hardware system. Front. Neuroinform. 3:17. doi:10.3389/neuro.11.017.2009

Received:

14 September 2008;

Paper pending published:

23 December 2008;

Accepted:

09 May 2009;

Published online:

05 June 2009.

Edited by:

Rolf Kötter, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Reviewed by:

Bernabe Linares-Barranco, Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, Spain
Adrian Whatley, University of Zurich, Switzerland

© 2009 Brüderle, Müller, Davison, Muller, Schemmel and Meier. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Daniel Brüderle, Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, Im Neuenheimer Feld 227, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany. e-mail: bruederle@kip.uni-heidelberg.de