Record from simulations

Recording devices (or recorders, in short) are used to sample or collect observable quantities like potentials, conductances, or spikes from neurons and synapses.

To determine what happens to recorded data, each recording device can specify a recording backend in its record_to property. The default backend is memory, which stores the recorded data in memory for later retrieval. Other backends write the data to file, to the screen, or stream it to other applications via the network. The different backends and their usage are explained in detail in the section about Recording Backends.

Recording devices can only reliably record data that was generated during the previous simulation time step interval. See the guide about running simulations for details about the temporal aspects of the simulation loop.

Note

Due to the need for internal buffering and the unpredictable order of thread execution, events are not necessarily recorded in chronological order.

Recording devices can fundamentally be subdivided into two groups:

  • Collectors gather events sent to them. Neurons are connected to collectors and the collector gathers the events emitted by the neurons connected to it.

  • Samplers actively interrogate their targets at given time intervals. This means that the sampler must be connected to the neuron (not the neuron to the sampler), and that the neuron must support the particular type of sampling.

Recorders for every-day situations

Where does data end up?

After a recording device has collected or sampled data, the data is handed to a dedicated recording backend, set for each recorder. These are responsible for how the data are processed.

Theoretically, recording backends are completely free in what they do with the data. The ones included in NEST can collect data in memory, display it on the terminal, or write it to files.

To specify the recording backend for a given recording device, the property record_to of the latter has to be set to the name of the recording backend to be used. This can either happen already in the call to Create() or by using SetStatus() on the model instance.

sr = nest.Create('spike_recorder', params={'record_to': 'ascii'})

Storing data in memory using the memory backend is the default for all recording devices as this does not require any additional setup of data paths or filesystem permissions and allows a convenient readout of data by the user after simulation.

Each recording backend may provide a specific set of parameters (explained in the backend documentation below) that will be included in the model status dictionary once the backend is set. This means that these parameters can only be reviewed and changed after the backend has been selected. In particular, recording-device specific per-device parameters cannot be set using SetDefaults(), but must rather be supplied either in the call to Create() or set on an instance using SetStatus().

Note

Even though parameters of different recording backends may have the same name, they are separate entities internally. This means that a value that was set for a parameter of a recording device when a specific backend was selected has to be set again on the new backend, if the backend is changed later on.

The full list of available recording backends can be obtained from the kernel attribute recording_backends.

>>> print(nest.recording_backends)
('ascii', 'memory', 'mpi', 'screen', 'sionlib')

If a recording backend has global properties (i.e., parameters shared by all enrolled recording devices), those can be inspected with :py:func`.GetDefaults`

>>> nest.GetDefaults("sionlib")
{'buffer_size': 1024,
 'filename': '',
 'sion_chunksize': 262144,
 'sion_collective': False,
 'sion_n_files': 1}

Such global parameters can be set using SetDefaults()

>>> nest.SetDefaults('sionlib', {'buffer_size': 512})

Built-in backends

Following is a list of built-in recording backends that come with NEST. Please note that the availability of some of them depends on the compile-time configuration for NEST. See the backend documentation for details.