We are happy to announce the release of Brian 2.1.3. This release includes a number of important fixes and performance improvements. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update. From this release on, conda packages will be provided via the conda-forge channel. For a limited time, we will additionally copy over packages to the brian-team channel, but this channel should now be considered deprecated. How to get Brian 2: http://brian2.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.3.1/introduction/install.html As always, please report bugs or suggestions to the github bug tracker (https://github.com/brian-team/brian2/issues) or to the brian-development mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com).

We’ve released Brian 1.4.4, a maintenance release for Brian 1 that fixes compatibility issues with recent versions of numpy/sympy. The packages are available on PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/brian Note that for new projects, you should use Brian 2 instead, the Brian version under active development.

We have released new bug fix releases for Brian 2 (version 2.1.2) and Brian2GeNN (version 1.1.5). The new Brian 2 release fixes two bugs:

1. an incorrect application of the substitution mechanism in equations (i.e. when using the same set of equations several times and changing the equations’ variable names via Brian’s Equation class), and
2. an inadvertent deactivation of parts of the new caching mechanism which resulted in a major reduction of its performance improvement.

The Brian2GeNN release adds a workaround for a bug in some version of the glibc library on Linux which can potentially lead to drastically reduced performance. This is the same workaround that had already been applied to Brian 2’s C++ standalone mode with an earlier release. How to get Brian 2: http://brian2.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.2/introduction/install.html How to get Brian2GeNN: http://brian2genn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction/index.html As always, please report bugs or suggestions to the github bug tracker (https://github.com/brian-team/brian2/issues) or to the brian-development mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com).

We are happy to announce the release of Brian 2.1. This release includes a number of fixes and small improvements, and two new major features: support for numerical integration with adaptive-timestep methods based on the GNU Scientific Library, and caching of code generation leading to faster simulation setup times, in particular for multiple runs of the same model. For an extensive list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update. We also release a new version 1.1. of Brian2GeNN, Brian’s interface to the GPU-enhanced Neuronal Network simulation environment (GeNN). This release does not contain any major new features except for bug and compatibility fixes, but an update is required for all users that update to Brian 2.1.   How to get Brian 2: follow the installation instructions in the documentation Further information about Brian2: http://brian2.readthedocs.org As always, please report bugs or suggestions to the github bug tracker or to the brian-development mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com).

We are proud to announce the release of Brian2GeNN, the Brian 2 interface to the GPU-enhanced Neuronal Network (GeNN) simulator. With this interface, a Brian 2 script (as long as it only uses supported features) can benefit from the potential performance benefits of a GPU by adding just two lines to the start of the script: import brian2genn set_device('genn') Brian2GeNN can be installed from the same Anaconda repository channel as Brian itself: conda install -c brian-team brian2genn This installation method will also include the GeNN simulator, while an installation from PyPI (via pip install brian2genn) will require a manual installation of GeNN. See the documentation (http://brian2genn.readthedocs.io) for more details. Note that in all cases, users need a CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU and a manual installation of the CUDA SDK. The actual performance benefits of using a GPU to run the simulation depend strongly on the details of the model but can be significant. With the Brian2GeNN package, we hope to make it as easy as possible for users to try it out for themselves. In case you run into problems with the installation of the package or with its use, please contact us at brian-development@googlegroups.com or open an issue on the Brian2GeNN bug tracker.

We are happy to announce the release of Brian 2.0.2. This release includes a large number of fixes and improvements, in particular important updates for the unit system and multi-compartmental simulations. Note that with this release we provide conda packages for Python 3.6, but no longer for Python 3.4. For an extensive list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update. How to get Brian 2: follow the installation instructions in the documentation Further information about Brian2: http://brian2.readthedocs.org As always, please report bugs or suggestions to the github bug tracker or to the brian-development mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com).

We are happy to announce the release of Brian 2.0.1. This is a bug fix release which does not add any new features but fixes a few important bugs and updates the documentation. Earlier versions of Brian 2 contained bugs that could lead to incorrect recordings from subgroups with PopulationRateMonitor and SpikeMonitor. The issue was only triggered under quite specific circumstances and not for all code generation targets (for more details, see github issues 772 and 777), but could in the worst case lead to the recording of incorrectly high firing rates at certain time steps (for SpikeMonitor, the bug meant that spikes beyond the size of the subgroup were recorded). The new release also fixes a few other issues reported by users, see the release notes for more information. We strongly recommend all users of Brian 2 to update. How to get Brian 2: follow the installation instructions in the documentation Further information about Brian2: http://brian2.readthedocs.org As always, please report bugs or suggestions to the github bug tracker or to the brian-development mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com).

We are very pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Brian neural network simulator. Brian is a free, open source simulator for spiking neural networks. It is written in the Python programming language and is available on almost all platforms. We believe that a simulator should not only save the time of processors, but also the time of scientists. Brian is therefore designed to be easy to learn and use, highly flexible and easily extensible. You can learn more about Brian from our front page. You can also try out Brian from your web browser, without having to install any software, using our interactive demo.

Major new features in 2.0

• Much more flexible model definitions. The behaviour of all model elements can now be defined by arbitrary equations specified in standard mathematical notation.
• Code generation as standard. Behind the scenes, Brian automatically generates and compiles C++ code to simulate your model, making it much faster.
• “Standalone mode”. In this mode, Brian generates a complete C++ project tree that implements your model. This can be then be compiled and run entirely independently of Brian. This leads to both highly efficient code, as well as making it much easier to run simulations on non-standard computational hardware, for example on robotics platforms.
• Multicompartmental modelling.
• Python 2 and 3 support.

That’s just a small fraction of the new features in 2.0, take a look at the full list.

Upgrading from Brian 1.4

Brian 2 is a rewrite from scratch, and introduces some backwards incompatible changes. In most cases, these should be relatively simple. We’ve written a detailed guide on how to update your simulations. Note that you can have both Brian 1 and Brian 2 installed simultaneously, so you can switch gradually.

Thanks

Brian 2 was written by Marcel Stimberg, Dan Goodman and Romain Brette. Do please remember to cite Brian if you use it for your research. We would also like to thank the large number of users (over 40) who contributed code, bug reports, etc.

On July 18th 2015, we’ll have a tutorial on “Modelling of spiking neural networks with Brian” at the CNS conference in Prague. It will feature introductory sessions in the morning (no prior Brian knowledge necessary) and more advanced topics in the afternoon. Follow this link to find the preliminary schedule.

Google Summer of Code 2015 (“a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.”) has announced the accepted mentoring organisations yesterday, among them the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF). Under the umbrella of the INCF, it is possible to work on Brian! We have added an idea for a project (“Improving the Brian simulator’s interoperability with simulator-independent model-description languages”) to the INCF webpage, but you are free to come up with a proposal of your own. The application period starts on March 16th, but now would be the time to discuss ideas with us. Head over to our mailing list (brian-development@googlegroups.com) if you have questions and/or ideas.