The NESTio project – replacement data recording backend for NEST

Eppler, Jochen Martin; Peyser, Alexander; Schenck, Wolfram

Conference Presentation (Other)

FZJ-2018-00330

The NESTio project – replacement data recording backend for NEST

Eppler, J. M. (Corresponding author)FZJ* ; Peyser, A.FZJ* ; Schenck, W.

2017

NEST Conference 2017, Jülich, Germany, 19 Dec 2017 - 20 Dec 2017

Please use a persistent id in citations: http://hdl.handle.net/2128/16564

Abstract: Simulation data is recorded in NEST by virtual spike detectors and multimeters. In regular intervals during NEST simulations, the recorded data is written to the file system. The current implementation of this writing process does not scale well to large simulations which run on large clusters or supercomputers with several hundreds to tens of thousands of compute nodes. For this reason, a completely new software architecture for the recording backends of NEST was developed as the nestio project. This architecture allows the user to direct recording device output to various different file formats and interfaces. Particularly appropriate for large-scale simulations on supercomputers is the implementation of a backend writing to sionlib container files. Benchmarking results show that the sionlib recording backend reduces simulation times by a considerable factor compared to the current NEST recording backend whenever large amounts of data are written to the file system during simulations.

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