BrainGrid plus Workbench: High-Performance/High-Quality Neural Simulation

Availability of affordable hardware that in effect enables desktop supercomputing has enabled more ambitious neural simulations driven by more complex software. However, this opportunity comes with costs, in terms of long learning curves to take advantage of the performance possibilities of idiosyncratic, architecturally heterogenous hardware and decreasing ability to be confident in the quality of simulation results. This paper describes a new neural simulation and software/data provenance framework that reduces the difficulty of taking full advantage of GPU computing and increases investigator confidence that simulations results are valid.