Getting started
Documentation This page contains the steps that you should follow right after you installed NEST. Another good starting point is the help page, which is available as command help
in SLI and nest.help()
in PyNEST
Set up the integrated helpdesk
The command helpdesk
needs to know which browser to launch in order to display the help pages. The browser is set as an option of helpdesk
. Please see the file ~/.nestrc
for an example setting firefox
as browser. Please note that the command helpdesk
does not work if you have compiled NEST with MPI support, but you have to enter the address of the helpdesk (file://$PREFIX/share/doc/nest(
) manually into the browser. Please replace $PREFIX
with the prefix you chose during the configuration of NEST. If you did not explicitly specify one, it is most likely set to /usr
or /usr/local
depending on what system you are.
Tell NEST about your MPI setup
If you compiled NEST with support for distributed computing via MPI, you have to tell it how your mpirun
/mpiexec
command works by defining the function mpirun in your ~/.nestrc
file. This file already contains an example implementation that should work with OpenMPI library.
Creating Models with NEST
After NEST is installed and configured properly, you can start to build your model.
Examples
A good starting point to learn more about modeling in NEST are the example networks that come together with NEST.
Where does data get stored
By default, the data files produced by NEST are stored in the directory from where NEST is called. The location can be changed by changing the property data_path
of the root node using nest.SetKernelStatus("data_path", "/path/to/data")
. This property can also be set using the environment variable NEST_DATA_PATH
. Please note that the directory /path/to/data
has to exist. A common prefix for all data files can be set using the property data_prefix
of the root node by calling nest.SetKernelStatus("data_prefix", "prefix")
or setting the environment variable NEST_DATA_PREFIX
.