Monsteer

Overview

Monsteer is a library for Interactive Supercomputing in the neuroscience domain. Monsteer facilitates the coupling of running simulations (currently NEST) with interactive visualization and analysis applications. Monsteer supports streaming of simulation data to clients (currenty only spikes) as well as control of the simulator from the clients (also kown as computational steering). Monsteer's main components are a C++ library, a MUSIC-based application and Python helpers.

Features

Monsteer provides the following functionality:

A brion::SpikeReportPlugin for streaming spike data using ZeroEQ. The plugin accepts URIs with the format "monsteer://[host[:port]]".
A MUSIC application called music_proxy to be used as the runtime gateway to simulators that support MUSIC, e.g. NEST.
A small Python library to interface the Simulator in the client side and MUSIC proxy on the simulator side. This library also activates the Brion plugin when imported.

Examples

The directory examples/nest contains two simple examples using NEST. For each example there is Python script (the simulator code) and a MUSIC configuration file. The music configuration files have instructions on how to run them. The first example, (files minimal.py and nest2music_proxy.music), is a minimal simulation with streaming enabled. The second example (minimal_steered.py and nest2music_proxy_with_steering.music) is an extended version of the first one that adds basic steering support.

This package does not provide any client code example at the moment. As a streaming client you can use the spikeConverter tool from Brion as a reference.

Building from Source

Monsteer is a cross-platform library, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants. It requires a C++11 compiler and uses CMake to create a platform-specific build environment. The following platforms and build environments are tested:

Linux: Ubuntu 16.04, RHEL 6.8 (Makefile, Ninja)
Mac OS X: 10.9 (Makefile, Ninja)

Building from source is as simple as:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/BlueBrain/Monsteer.git
mkdir Monsteer/build
cd Monsteer/build
cmake -GNinja -DCLONE_SUBPROJECTS=ON ..
ninja

Funding & Acknowledgment

The development of this software was supported by funding to the Blue Brain Project, a research center of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), from the Swiss government’s ETH Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s FP7-ICT programme under Grant Agreement No. 604102 (Human Brain Project RUP).

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Specific Grant Agreement No. 720270 (Human Brain Project SGA1).

This project is based upon work supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) under Award No. OSR-2017-CRG6-3438.

License

Monsteer is licensed under the LGPL, unless noted otherwise, e.g., for external dependencies. See file LICENSE.txt for the full license.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

BlueBrain / Monsteer