An Introduction to SLI

Introduction

NEST can be started by typing

<prefix>/bin/nest

at the command prompt. You should then see something like this:

gewaltig@jasmin-vm:~$ nest
            -- N E S T 2 beta --

  Copyright 1995-2009 The NEST Initiative
   Version 1.9-svn Feb  6 2010 00:33:50

This program is provided AS IS and comes with
NO WARRANTY. See the file LICENSE for details.

Problems or suggestions?
  Website     : http://www.nest-initiative.org
  Mailing list: nest_user@nest-initiative.org

Type 'help' to get more information.
Type 'quit' or CTRL-D to quit NEST.

Command line switches

Type

nest --help

to find out about NEST's command-line parameters.

gewaltig@jasmin-vm:~$ nest --help
usage: nest [options] [file ..]
  -h  --help                print usage and exit
  -v  --version             print version information and exit.

  -   --batch               read input from a stdin/pipe
      --userargs=arg1:...   put user defined arguments in statusdict::userargs
  -d  --debug               start in debug mode (implies --verbosity=ALL)
      --verbosity=ALL       turn on all messages.
      --verbosity=DEBUG|STATUS|INFO|WARNING|ERROR|FATAL
                            show messages of this priority and above.
      --verbosity=QUIET     turn off all messages.

Supplying SLI scripts with parameters

Using the --userargs=arg1:... command line switch, it is possible to supply a SLI script with parameters from the outside of NEST. A common use case for this are parameter sweeps, where the parameters are defined in a bash script and multiple instances of NEST are used to test one parameter each. A bash script for this could look like this:

for lambda in `seq 1 20`; do
  for gamma in `seq 1 5`; do
    nest --userargs=lambda=$lambda:$gamma=$gamma simulation.sli
  done
done

The corresponding SLI script simulation.sli could use the supplied parameters like this:

/args mark statusdict/userargs :: {(=) breakup} Map { arrayload pop int exch cvlit exch } forall >> def
args /lambda get ==

The first line first gets the array of user supplied arguments (userargs) from the statusdict and breaks each element at the "="-symbol. It then converts the first element (lambda, gamma) to a literal and the second argument (the number) to an integer. Using mark and >>, the content of the userargs array is added to a dictionary, which is stored under the name args. The second line just prints the content of the la variable.

SLI user manual

This manual gives a brief overview of the SLI programming language.

  1. First Steps
  2. Objects and data types
  3. Programming in SLI
  4. Using files and keyboard input
  5. Neural simulations