MUSIC support?

[dilawar]

To coordinate many simulators working together, INCF has come up with MUSIC https://github.com/INCF/MUSIC.

It is an API allowing large scale neuron simulators using MPI internally to exchange data during runtime. MUSIC provides mechanisms to transfer massive amounts of event information and continuous values from one parallel application to another. Special care has been taken to ensure that existing simulators can be adapted to MUSIC. In particular, MUSIC handles data transfer between applications that use different time steps and different data allocation strategies.

Currently, Smoldyn can integrate with MOOSE and other simulators in serial mode (see #19).

[ssandrews]

Thanks for letting me know about this, which sounds like a good thing. Do you think that there is a current need for this, or is it just something that might be useful in the future?

[dilawar]

This is something for the future.

This effort will be fruitful if most simulators agree on the standard. Maybe a good idea to join forces with INCF.

[jonrkarr]

I thought I'd share my thoughts here since the spirit of this has some similarities to what we're doing to BioSimulators.

I think MUSIC is a nice idea. It allows deeper integration than what is feasible with BioSimulators. This design would enable coupled simulations using algorithms from multiple tools.

However, the degree of integration required for MUSIC and the effort required is high. As a result, few simulation tools will be able to support MUSIC. As far as I can tell, MUSIC has been around for at least 13 years and I think only three simulation tools support it. In addition, it would be challenging to build models that can take advantage of multiple coupled simulators.