GPU-Accelerated Simulations of an Electric Stimulus and Neural Activities in Electrolocation

摘要

To understand mechanism of information processing by a neural network, it is important to well know a sensory stimulus. However, it is hard to examine details of a real stimulus received by an animal. Furthermore, it is too hard to simultaneously measure a received stimulus and neural activities of a neural system. We have studied the electrosen-sory system of an electric fish in electrolocation. It is also difficult to measure the electric stimulus received by an electric fish in the real environment and neural activities evoked by the electric stimulus. To address this issue, we have applied computational simulation. We developed the simulation software accelerated by a GPU to calculate various electric stimuli and neural activities of the electrosensory system using a GPU. This paper describes comparison of computation time between CPUs and a GPU in calculation of the electric field and the neural activities.