Event driven simulation

Event driven simulation

Since in a typical simulation the firing rate of the neurons is about 30Hz and the time constant of a synaptic current is typically about 3ms most of the time a synapse is ``idle''. This observation encouraged us to implement some ideas of event driven simulators like SpikeNet: We decided to cut off the very far tail of the exponential decaying synaptic responses (after 5 time constants) and remove those synapses from the list of active synapses (which are advanced every time step). A synapse is re-activated if it receives a further spike. For large networks with lots of synapses these idea results in an average speed-up of 2 to 3.

 
(C) 2003, Thomas Natschläger last modified 07/10/2006