Running Your Own Simulations

Quick guide to getting the Live! system running. This will create a virtual machine running Debian Jessie with NEST and PyNN already installed. Courtesy of Oliver Breitwieser and Eric Müller.

Courtesy of Oliver Breitwieser.

For most people, using the Live! system is the most comfortable and easiest method to start playing with NEST and PyNN. Still, people who are already running Linux might want to install the required software themselves, so here is how to do it.
Depending on which distribution you are running, you should be able to install the following packages (Python 2.7) via your package manager (aptitude, yum, emerge, pacman etc.):
- python-numpy
- python-matplotlib
- python-pip
- libncurses-dev
- libgsl0-dev
These are the names for Debian/Ubuntu, in other distros they might be called slightly differently.

•  First compile and install nest 2.8.0. The source code can be downloaded from GitHub
•  Extract and compile the following commands to compile and install NEST for the local user:
     tar xf nest-2.8.0.tar.gz
     cd nest-2.8.0
     ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local
     make && make install
  An alternative - to install it system-wide - would be
     ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
     make && sudo make install
•  Afterwards, install PyNN and its dependencies via the previously installed pip utility:
     pip install --user PyNN lazyarray quantities neo
  As before, this installs the Python packages for the current user only. To install globally, simply drop the --user and run as root.