Parallel Investigations of the Dynamics of Neural Microcircuits

Our ongoing work is focused on the investigation of the suitability of many core and multicore systems to computational neuroscience simulations. We aim at providing a deeper understanding of the influence the various parallelisation techniques have on the dynamics of spiking neural microcircuits -- as they show an almost chaotic behaviour. For that, we are developing a methodology for the evaluation of parallel implementations of biologically-based neural models and small world neural networks. Following our methodology, we designed a framework to assess the behaviour and performance of different parallel and sequential implementations of simulation models and techniques. We present first results obtained on multicore systems with OpenMP parallelisation of Hodgkin-Huxley based-models.