The Brian spiking neural network simulator

New release: Brian 2.10

Brian team — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:00:00 GMT

We are happy to announce the Brian 2.10 release. This release extends the functionality of PopulationRateMonitor and SpikeMonitor, which now provide a unified interface to for smoothed and binned rates, and adds a new run_at function to execute code at specific time points. It also fixes several important bugs and comes with performance improvements for C++ standalone mode. Behind the scenes, it made important progress in refactoring aspects of our code generation system, working towards the long-term goal of having a single C++ code generation system for standalone and runtime mode, and retiring the current Cython code generation mechanism.

For more details, head over to the release notes.

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New release: Brian 2.9.0

Brian team — Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 GMT

We are happy to announce the Brian 2.9 release. This release extends the functionality of Brian’s linked variable feature (in particular, it can now be used to refer to a global modulation term in Synapses), and adds a “graceful interrupt” feature, allowing users to interrupt a simulation with Ctrl+C without triggering the usual Exception. As usual, the release also fixes a number of bugs and incompatibilities and comes with new examples in its documentation.

For more details, head over to the release notes.

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GSoC 2025

Brian team — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 15:45:00 GMT

[Update: An earlier version of this website had an incorrect date for the submission deadline. Sincere apologies to anyone who relied on this information!]

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 2025 starts on March 24th, and the deadline is on April 8th (full timeline for GSoC 2025). 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.

New release: Brian 2.8.0

Brian team — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 16:00:00 GMT

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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New releases: Brian 2.7.0 and 2.7.1

Brian team — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 08:00:00 GMT

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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New release: Brian 2.6

Brian team — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 15:40:00 GMT

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

Brian team — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 13:15:00 GMT

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.

Brian receives the French Open Science Free Research Software Award

Brian team — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 16:30:00 GMT

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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Recommendations for GSoC 2023 applications

Brian team — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 16:30:00 GMT

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.

CNS 2022 satellite tutorial on Brian (June 30th)

Brian team — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 14:55:00 GMT

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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