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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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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 release: Brian 2.3

Happy New Year to all Brian users 🎉! We are happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.3. This release fixes a number of bugs and introduces some new features. It also paves the way for the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 – given that Python 2 is now no longer officially supported, Brian 2.3 will be the last release to support 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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Brian 2.2

We are happy to announce the release of Brian 2.2. This release includes a number of important fixes and performance improvements. It also makes sure that simulation no longer give platform-dependent results for certain corner cases that involve the division of integers. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update. Brian 2 can be installed with Anaconda from the conda-forge channel, or with pip from the pypi repository. Detailed installation instructions: http://brian2.readthedocs.io/en/2.2/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).

Brian 2.1.3

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).

Brian 2.1.2 and Brian2GeNN 1.1.5

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).

Brian 2.1 and Brian2GeNN 1.1

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).

Brian2GeNN 1.0

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.