What's new? as of November 27, 2007

NEURON 6.1 now available

More convenient installation

Mac users with OS X 10.4 can now download a universal binary installer
     that will work on both i686 and PowerPC Macs.
All binary installers (UNIX, Linux, OS X, MSWin) now include Python.

More flexible compilation under MSWin

NEURON can be compiled to make use of either the Cygwin
     or the non-Cygwin build of Python.

Enhanced interoperability with other tools and simulators

Two of NEURON's GUI tools are now able to import XML:
     --the Import3D tool can read morphometric data in MorphML
     --the CellBuilder can read model specifications in NeuroML

Increased computational power and efficiency

forall {stmt} in the context of a cell object is now fast.
     This will be particularly helpful with network simulations.
MSWin users will benefit from NEURON's adoption of standard MSWin
     dynamic loading. The practical consequence is that mod files are no longer
     limited to calling the functions listed in src/mswin/windll/nrnmech.h

Python

See relevant entries under More convenient installation
     and More flexible compilation under MSWin

Parallel models

The Multisplit method for implementing distributed models of individual neurons
     has been extended, so that a single cell model can now be split into enough pieces
     to do load balancing on a multicore workstation.
Models implemented with the Multisplit method can now be simulated with the
     global variable time step method.
     Example: the CA3 pyramidal neuron model published by Lazarewicz et al. (2002)
     (available from ModelDB via accession number 20007) running on a
     4 core x86_64 PC under Linux:

           processes  runtime
               1       62.7
               4       16.6