Nonlinear Behaviour in the MPI-Parallelised Model of the Rat Somatosensory Cortex

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Wojcik, Grzegorz M. | Kaminski, Wieslaw A.

Affiliations: Institute of Computer Science, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University pl. Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej 5, 20-031-Lublin, Poland, e-mail: gmwojcik@gmail.com

Abstract: Mammalian brains consisting of up to 1011 neurons belong to group of the most complex systems in the Universe. For years they have been one of the hardest objects of simulation. There are many different approaches to modelling of neurons, but one of the most biologically correct is Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model. Simulations that require solving a large number of nonlinear differential equations (fundamental in HH model) are always time and power consuming. The structures discussed in this article simulate a part of the rat somatosensory cortex. We use a modular architecture of the network divided into layers and sub-regions. Because of a high degree of complexity effective parallelisation of algorithms is required. We propose method of parallelisation for the network and the results of simulations using GENESIS parallelised for MPI environment are presented. An occurrence of nonlinear behaviour is demonstrated. Most notably, in large biological neural networks consisting of the HH neurons, nonlinearity is shown to manifest itself in the Poincaré sections generated for the varying value of neural membrane's potential.

Keywords: Hodgkin–Huxley neurons, Poincare sections, nonlinear behaviour

Journal: Informatica, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 461-470, 2008