We are happy to announce the Brian 2.8 release. This release fixes a number of small bugs and improves our release infrastructure. In addition, it includes an important performance improvement for random number generation in C++ standalone mode, which significantly speeds up everything that needs randomness (e.g. PoissonGroup). It also comes with the Diehl & Cook (2015) model in the documentation, contributed by Björn Lindqvist (thanks!).

For more details, head over to the release notes.

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We are happy to announce the releases of Brian 2.7 and 2.7.1, together with the compatible CUDA backends Brian2CUDA 1.0a5 and 1.0a6. Apart from the usual mix of small improvements and bug fixes, the main new feature is the compatibility with the numpy 2.0 release.

For more details, head over to the release notes.

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It’s been a while since the last release, so we are very happy to announce that Brian 2.6 is finally out 🎉 This release comes with a major new feature to run standalone simulations repeatedly (or in parallel), without recompiling its code. We now also automatically push Docker images to Docker Hub, provide Python wheels for Python 3.12, and build and test on Apple Silicon hardware. The release also fixes various compatibility issues with the upcoming numpy 2.0 release – although we cannot be sure yet whether the ongoing development will not make additional changes neccessary. As always, the new release also fixes a bunch of small bugs and errors, and updates the documentation and the examples.

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We are very happy that the INCF has been again selected to be a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code (“a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development”). As in last years, the Brian simulator project takes part and offers several projects for students/”open source beginners” to work on. The application period for the Google Summer of Code 2024 starts on March 18th (full timeline for GSoC 2024). With this post we give some general information about the ideal contributor application from our point of view. The recommendations we give here hold for all of the proposed projects, but we will also try to give information specific to the respective projects in the corresponding neurostars threads. For a full list of Brian-related projects, see the end of this post.

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We are proud and happy to announce that the Brian simulator has been awarded with an Open Science Free Research Software Award by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. In the second edition of these awards, eight software applications developed by French teams were rewarded for their “contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge or for their promising work in this area.”:

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The application period for the Google Summer of Code 2023 starts on March 20th (full timeline for GSoC 2023). With this post we give some general information about the ideal contributor application from our point of view. The recommendations we give here hold for all of the proposed projects, but we will also try to give information specific to the respective projects in the corresponding neurostars threads. For a full list of Brian-related projects, see the end of this post.

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On June 30th, 2022, we will have a Brian tutorial, as part of a series of free satellite tutorials organized by the INCF/OCNS Software Working Group two weeks before CNS*2022. You can find more information about the tutorials here: ocns.github.io/SoftwareWG/pages/software-wg-satellite-tutorials-at-cns-2022.html

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The application period for the Google Summer of Code 2022 starts on April 4th (full timeline for GSoC 2022). With this post we give some general information about the ideal contributor application from our point of view. The recommendations we give here hold for all of the proposed projects, but we will also try to give information specific to the respective projects in the corresponding neurostars threads. For a full list of Brian-related projects, see the end of this post.

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It took us a while, but we are very happy to finally announce a new release, Brian 2.5 🎉. This release comes with a large number of bug fixes, various small improvements to the C++ code generation process, new examples and improved documentation, as well as a more powerful “generator syntax” for synapse generation. In particular, it is now possible to generate a fixed number of synapses randomly – either for each pre-synaptic or for each post-synaptic cell. We have also updated our build and testing infrastructure, and now provide binary pip-installable packages for all platforms, including the fancy new Apple hardware. Please let us know if you run into any issues!

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This is the second article in the “bug hunt” series. In these articles, I go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it.

Today’s bug is about a strangely named file that seemingly appears out of nowhere when running Brian simulations. The final fix for the bug will turn out to be a single character change in the Brian code base 😀!

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