Dear all!

First a big thank you to Jochen and Dennis as our release managers and all contributing developers for making the first timed NEST release, NEST 3.1 happen!

We will do our very best to turn this into a tradition and aim to release NEST 3.2 on 15 December. Until then, you will find the newest fixes and improvements as always on Github.

Best regards, Hans Ekkehard

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Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Head, Department of Data Science President, The NEST Initiative

Faculty of Science and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway

Phone +47 6723 1560 Email hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.nomailto:hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.no Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser

On 15/09/2021, 16:31, "Dennis Terhorst" <d.terhorst@fz-juelich.demailto:d.terhorst@fz-juelich.de> wrote:

Dear NEST enthusiasts,

we have just released NEST 3.1https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5508805 (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5508805https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5508805) which is the result of 460 commits by 17 developers since NEST 3.0https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4739103 which was released on 2021-06-10.

This release contains many bug fixes and improvements, especially in the Python setup where support for Python environments was improved.

The PyNEST API was extended to support a more intuitive way of setting and retrieving kernel parametershttps://nest-simulator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release_notes/v3.1/index.html. Where you previously had nest.SetKernelStatus({"resolution": 0.2}) in your simulation script, you can now just write nest.resolution = 0.2. Kernel attributes now come with their own docstrings and even tab-completion works for them! Additionally, PyNEST functions are now directly linked to the API reference throughout the documentation.

The testsuite now handles MPI tests more consistently and uses pytest for all Python tests.

We hope you enjoy the new release! Please do not hesitate to contact us in case of questions or ideas for further improvement.

Best regards Jochen and Dennis

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Dipl.-Phys. Dennis Terhorst

Coordinator Software Development

Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6)

Computational and Systems Neuroscience &

Theoretical Neuroscience,

Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6)

Jülich Research Centre, Member of the Helmholz Association and JARA

52425 Jülich, Germany

Building 15.22 Room 4004

Phone +49 2461 61-85062

Fax +49 2461 61- 9460

d.terhorst@fz-juelich.demailto:d.terhorst@fz-juelich.de

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