Large Scale Modelling of Striatal Network

Abstract: Numerical simulations play an important role to uncover the dynamic behaviour at the cellular and network levels and accelerate the work in the field of Neuroscience. The modern computational technologies have made it possible to simulate a huge network of neurons which was possible only in theory two decades ago. The simulations of networks of thousand of neurons are carried out on the parallel machine Cray XE6 system, based on the AMD Opteron 12-core which shows good scaling properties. These models can be beneficial for the generation of global behaviour which could not be produced by fewer cells. For example, the effect of inhibition in a striatal network of MSNs is only seen if the number of cells and the synapses are increased sufficiently. The simulated responses of cells are greatly influenced by the numerical scheme. This has been demonstrated using gap junctions between striatal fast spiking inter-neurons. Implicit numerical schemes need to be used in order to get stable and accurate results. The simulations are carried out using serial and parallel implementations on the GENESIS and PGENESIS simulator respectively. The limitations of the simulators have been highlighted by performing several simulation experiments. After exploiting the shortcomings presented in this work, it would be possible to use the insight to investigate biologically relevant questions.