Getting started
From NEST
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
Configure 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 helpdesk does not work if you have compiled NEST with MPI support.
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.
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.
Creating Models with NEST
After NEST is installed and configured properly, you can start to create the model. See page Modeling concepts contains a description of the concepts used in NEST and the basic steps to set up a simulation in NEST.
