This simulation was used in Zenke et al. 2013 to study the stability of the asynchronous irregular background state in a balanced network in the presence of TripletSTDP over extended periods of time (up to 24h network time; see A in Figure below).

To run the code after successful compilation it suffices to invoke

./sim_background --tau 20

Here the parameter tau is the time constant behind the homeostatic rate estimate, the role of which is center of the study in Zenke et al. 2013. The program will first simulate the non-plastic network for a period of 3*tau seconds before plasticity is enabled. Since the simulation of this plastic network is relatively heavy it offers itself for parallel simulation.