Analyzing a simulation

Any simulation that has been executed and uploaded to the SimTracker is available for analysis. This tutorial walks through how to use some standard analyses available within SimTracker. However, users may also access the results from each simulation directly, by opening the directory with the same name as the simulation, found within the ’results’ directory of the model repository. The results directory can also be opened by right-clicking (Ctrl-click on Mac) the entry for the simulation in the main SimTracker runs list. The spikeraster.dat file within the results folder contains a list of all spike times and which cell caused each spike during the simulation. The ringdemo simulation produces a spikeraster file that contains the times found in Table [tab:outputs:raster], which compare well to the results from [HC08], found in their section 3.3.5 Reporting simulation results.

  1. Select the completed simulation of interest from the table in the SimTracker.
  2. Look at the table on the bottom right side of the SimTracker for a list of available outputs for that particular simulation (the list will vary depending on which output files users choose to print for their simulations). For now, click to select the checkboxes next to the ’Spike Raster’ and ’Membrane Potential’ (Figure [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:01]) outputs. Note: For more information on any particular output, click on that row to highlight that output type and then hover the mouse anywhere over the output table to see a tooltip with guidance about the selected output type.
  3. After selecting the outputs of interest, click the ’Generate’ button to produce them as MATLAB figures. If prompted to enter a GID (global ID number for a cell type), enter ’0’ to display the membrane potential for cell #0. Users can zoom in, pan, and otherwise edit or save the figures once the MATLAB figures are generated (Figure [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:02a] and [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:02]).
  4. Alternatively, users can directly export the figures to an image format of their choice by selecting the ’fig’ menu option in the file extension pop-up menu and choosing a different file format (such as jpeg, bmp, pdf, etc.) (Figure [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:03]).
  5. Exported images will be saved in the results folder for that particular simulation, which will be logged in the figure-generation log on the lower left side of the SimTracker (Figure [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:04]). To view the file location of the saved image, users can right click in the figure-generation log or in the main simulation list window and choose to open the simulation results directory (Figures [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:04] and [fig:tutAnalyzeStep:05]).

Tutorials