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This article underlines the learning and discrimination capabilities of a model of associative memory based on artificial networks of spiking neurons. Inspired from neuropsychology and neurobiology, the model implements top-down modulations, as in neocortical layer V pyramidal neurons, with a learning rule based on synaptic plasticity (STDP), for performing a multimodal association learning task. A temporal correlation method of analysis proves the ability of the model to associate specific activity patterns to different samples of stimulation. Even in the absence of initial learning and with continuously varying weights, the activity patterns become stable enough for discrimination.

In a Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), spike emissions are sparsely and irregularly distributed both in time and in the network architecture. Since a current feature of SNNs is a low average activity, efficient implementations of SNNs are usually based on an Event-Driven Simulation (EDS). On the other hand, simulations of large scale neural networks can take advantage of distributing the neurons on a set of processors (either workstation cluster or parallel computer). This article presents DAMNED, a large scale SNN simulation framework able to gather the benefits of EDS and parallel computing. Two levels of parallelism are combined: Distributed mapping of the neural topology, at the network level, and local multithreaded allocation of resources for simultaneous processing of events, at the neuron level. Based on the causality of events, a distributed solution is proposed for solving the complex problem of scheduling without synchronization barrier., Comment: 6 pages