This is the Vogels-Abbott Benchmark (from Brette et al. 2007) network adapted from the examples included in PyNN. It implements a smaller version of the conductance based, self-sustained balanced network from (Vogels and Abbott (2005)).

To run the program the network first needs priming with external Poisson noise before it can self-sustain its activity. To do that invoke the program with the following command line arguments

./sim_coba_benchmark --dir /tmp --prime --simtime 0.050
./sim_coba_benchmark --dir /tmp --simtime 5

The prime keyword in the first command causes the network to run with external Poisson input and save its network state at the end of the run to a set of files created under /tmp. Note that you can give any other directory name where you want the files to be created. The second call to the progrem without the –prime argument causes the program to read the current network state from these saved files and runs the network for the specified period in simtime. All spiking output and the memory trace (mem file) of a single neuron are written to the directory specified with –dir and are prefixed with coba.*.

In the above example the output is written to /tmp.

bash-4.1$ ls -l /tmp/coba.0.*
   8 -rw-r--r-- 1 zenke lcn1    5447 Jan 13 11:17 /tmp/coba.0.log
3208 -rw-r--r-- 1 zenke lcn1 3282541 Jan 13 11:17 /tmp/coba.0.e.ras
 764 -rw-r--r-- 1 zenke lcn1  780757 Jan 13 11:17 /tmp/coba.0.i.ras
 928 -rw-r--r-- 1 zenke lcn1  950019 Jan 13 11:17 /tmp/coba.0.e.mem
 916 -rw-r--r-- 1 zenke lcn1  935976 Jan 13 11:17 /tmp/coba.0.e.gaba
 880 -rw-r--r-- 1 zenke lcn1  900018 Jan 13 11:17 /tmp/coba.0.e.ampa

This figure shows the rasterplot of the spiking activity of the excitatory population written to /tmp/coba.0.e.ras.

The figure shows the evolution of the membrane potential of one excitatory cell during the simulation.