NengoOCL 2.1.0 released

The NengoOCL team is glad to announce the release of NengoOCL 2.1.0.

What is NengoOCL?

NengoOCL (formerly known as Nengo OpenCL) is a backend for Nengo that uses the OpenCL framework to run large-scale neural models on CPUs, GPUs, and other OpenCL-capable platforms. Using the OpenCL backend can be orders of magnitude faster than the reference backend for large models.

How do I use it?

To use NengoOCL, replace instances of nengo.Simulator with nengo_ocl.Simulator.

For example, if you have a network called model and you run it with

with nengo.Simulator(model) as sim:
    sim.run(10)

you would change that to

with nengo_ocl.Simulator(model) as sim:
    sim.run(10)

and that’s it!

What’s new?

NengoOCL 2.1.0 adds compatibility for Nengo 3.1.0, and retires compatibility for Nengo 3.0 (users wishing to use Nengo 3.0 should use NengoOCL 2.0).

To see the full list of changes in version 2.1.0, head to the Github release page.

How do I get it?

Installing NengoOCL is more difficult than other parts of the Nengo ecosystem since OpenCL must be properly installed first. See our notes on installing OpenCL for assistance.

Once OpenCL is installed, use pip.

pip install --upgrade nengo-ocl

If something goes wrong during the installation, which can happen due to differing OpenCL installs, refer to our installation notes for assistance.

Where can I learn more?

Where can I get help?

You’re already there! If you have an issue upgrading or have any other questions, please post them in this forum.