2021 04 26 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
   • NEST Documentation Style Guide (#1986)
   • Single vs double quotes for Python strings? See also this discussion
   • Which well-established style guide to build on? See also this discussion

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
   • STDP test-case started at NEST Hackathon, revealed some bugs that are being worked on
   • preparations for NESTML 4.0 release
2. PyNEST
   • MPI enabled version of NEST-Server was added
3. Kernel
   • MPI buffers/compressed spikes #1767
     • performance testing needs to be done before merge (as e.g. with RNGs, incl. plots and statistics), after reviewers are happy.
     • some benchmarks already shown improvements
   • worked on secondary events, code review session during NEST Hackathon
4. Installation
   • worked on issues of @helveg at the Hackathon, changes in Python installation, working on PR#1959 which will close a number of open issues.
   • discussion started to clean up cmake and make targets to smoothen installation workflow with different environments
5. Infrastructure
   • transition of nest-extension-module repository to github-actions
   • looking into larger build pipelines between the different NEST-related repositories
6. Documentation
   • discussion about error messages
   • worked on PRs
     • developer space now moved (#1995)
     • nest server docs improved (#2022)
     • RNG docs
     • style guides (see in-depth discussion)
7. EBRAINS
   • discussion for EBRAINS High-level support team (HLST) contact person of NEST Simulator
   • invitation for talk about NEST on ICEI infrastructure (contact @heplesser)
   • currently ongoing ANDA Course can provide feed-back about usage of EBRAINS resources soon. (preliminary: works but slow and few resources)
8. (Feature) Random number generation
   • Closed Project.
9. (Feature) Automated Testing
   • no updates
10. (Feature) Extension Module System
    • no updates

In-depth discussion

NEST Documentation Style Guide (#1986)

• made some general style decisions for documentation (will be included in the style guide)
  • do not use contractions
  • punctuation: ", for example," with commas, …
  • always use sec_/fig_/… reference prefixes
  • …
• started discussion will be continued in separate meeting focusing on NEST documentation first