Parallel scalable simulations of biological neural networks using TensorFlow: A beginner’s guide

Biological neural networks are often modeled as systems of coupled, nonlinear, ordinary or partial differential equations. The number of differential equations used to model a network increases with the size of the network and the level of detail used to model individual neurons and synapses. As one scales up the size of the simulation, it becomes essential to utilize powerful computing platforms. While many tools exist that solve these equations numerically, they are often platform-specific. Further, there is a high barrier of entry to developing flexible platform-independent general-purpose code that supports hardware acceleration on modern computing architectures such as GPUs/TPUs and Distributed Platforms. TensorFlow is a Python-based open-source package designed for machine learning algorithms. However, it is also a scalable environment for a variety of computations, including solving differential equations using iterative algorithms such as Runge-Kutta methods. In this article and the accompanying tutorials, we present a simple exposition of numerical methods to solve ordinary differential equations using Python and TensorFlow. The tutorials consist of a series of Python notebooks that, over the course of five sessions, will lead novice programmers from writing programs to integrate simple one-dimensional ordinary differential equations using Python to solving a large system (1000’s of differential equations) of coupled conductance-based neurons using a highly parallelized and scalable framework. Embedded with the tutorial is a physiologically realistic implementation of a network in the insect olfactory system. This system, consisting of multiple neuron and synapse types, can serve as a template to simulate other networks.