News

New release: Brian 2.6

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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GSoC 2024

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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Recommendations for GSoC 2023 applications

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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Recommendations for GSoC 2022 applications

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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New release: Brian 2.5

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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New release: Brian 2.4

In these very particular times, we are nevertheless happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.4. This release fixes a large number of bugs and includes a number of small improvements. As announced with the previous release, Brian 2.4 is the first release that no longer supports Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.

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New Brian community forum

Ask questions, chat and learn with other Brian users, show off what you’ve done, suggest new features, … We will try out a brand new forum for support questions and general discussion, replacing our previous forums on Google Groups. The new forum builds on the Discourse platform which gives us exciting new features such as giving credit to users for answering questions.

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Brian online tutorial

We will experiment with running a Brian tutorial online. The first tutorial of this kind will take place on Friday, August 7th 2020 from 2pm-6pm BST (UTC+1, see here for other timezones). Free (but mandatory) registration here. We will run the tutorial as a Zoom meeting – registering with the link will give you the URL (please don’t share so we can avoid zoombombing). We will record the meeting and if everything goes reasonably well, we will upload the videos later.

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