2020 07 20 Open NEST Developer Video Conference

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Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Review of NEST User Mailing List
3. Project team round
4. In-depth discussion
   • MPI buffer-size optimization
   • Showing plots in examples

Mailing list

• https://nest-simulator.org/mailinglist

Project team round

Here we discuss topics that need broader attention, for example questions that came up but are outside a single project's scope, larger planned changes/PRs that affect all teams or pending work that is blocked by external factors.

1. Models / NESTML
   • worked on the OCNS tutorial, went well, interactive format
   • will prepare brief report (infrastructure/Fenix, materials)
   • some minor updates on Jupyter notebooks
   • tutorials were specifically not recorded
2. PyNEST
   • no report (vacation)
3. Kernel
   • no report (vacation)
4. Installation
   • organizing handling of MacOS issues
   • no major issues
5. Infrastructure
   • currently Travis build of MacOS is taking a very long time, causes time-out's. Is being investigated. currently brew seems to eat time.
   • whitelist exists for linux, but not for Mac
6. Documentation
   • communication of updates to ebrains.eu pages
7. EBRAINS
   • no report (vacation)
8. (Feature) Random number generation
   • nothing to report (vacation)
9. (Feature) Automated Testing
   • awaiting reviews for a couple of PRs
   • some issues need more discussion

In-depth discussion

buffer-size optimization

• Discussion of pull request on the optimization of buffer-sizes based on current maximum spike counts in communication steps
• suggested reviewers: Jakob & Jasper
• see huge benefits in simulations of models with high fluctuations in spike rates
• currently see a lot of style changes, which makes creating the PR difficult
  • could be related to #1682
  • could be clang-format version, that needs to be exactly 3.6 (ref extras/travis-build.sh for installation instructions)

Showing plots in examples

• #1695 Fix issues when showing plots in examples
• show() has been removed, because headless systems like Travis would not be able to run the scripts/examples
• requires the user to call some kind of show() him/herself, but not documented anywhere
• figures for examples still need to be generated for documentation
  • web-pages are generated with a sphinx plug-in, which does not need an explicit show()
• could just comment out the show(), user can then un-comment it.
  • cumbersome to novice users
  • could also s/show()// in the build pipeline.
  • similar replacement already used for creating SVGs instead of PNGs
  • maybe setting agg back-end may already suffice to not need a GUI

Conclusion

• we keep examples with show() as easy as possible for the users
• change only the pipeline(s) to handle headless systems (Travis/Readthedocs/...)