Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Choosing a simulator environment

8am
Trying to find a good simulator for my synchrony code and STDP idea. I requested NEST 2.0 via email twice but never got any replies yet. I have a feeling that I have to implement my own simulator this time, because I have to manipulate the input in a way that people usually don't.
Plain MATLAB is one easy way to approach, but the speed is a concern. Although recent versions of MATLAB really showed great performance enhancement via JIT compiler. (I wrote a C-MEX to optimize a speed and it was not better than plain for loops in MATLAB!!) The good thing about MATLAB is that I am already very used to it (so I can implement things very fast), and the bad thing is that it is not a good programming language.
The other options are to use C, C++, python with numPy, or some other languages.
After reading alternatives to MATLAB and python vs matlab, I decided to try numPy, it is faster than JIT equipped MATLAB in a few examples.

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