Accelerating Brain Simulations on Graphical Processing Units

Abstract

NEural Simulation Tool(NEST) is a large scale spiking neuronal network simulator of the brain. In this work we present a CUDA(R) implementation of NEST. We were able to gain a speedup of factor 20 for the computational parts of NEST execution using a different data structure than NEST's default. Our partial implementation shows the potential gains and limitations of such possible port. We discuss possible novel approaches to be able to adapt generic spiking neural network simulators such as NEST to run on commodity or high-end GPGPUs.