Functional Neural Architectures (FNA) is a python library for neural network functional benchmarking, analysis and comparison. It provides high-level wrapper for PyNEST and TensorFlow (which is used as the core simulation engines). As such, the types of architectures and their properties are determined by the models available in NEST / TF. The use of these simulators allows efficient and highly scalable simulations of very large and complex circuits, constrained only by the computational resources available to the user. The modular design allows the user to specify numerical experiments with varying degrees of complexity depending on concrete research objectives. The generality of some of these experiments allows the same types of measurements to be performed on a variety of different circuits, which can be useful for benchmarking and comparison purposes. Additionally, the code was designed to allow an effortless migration across computing systems, i.e. the same simulations can be executed in a local machine, in a computer cluster or a supercomputer, with straightforward resource allocation. The code is licensed under GPLv2.

This work was done in the Computation in Neural Circuits (CiNC) group, at the Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6) and Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6), Jülich Research Centre, Germany. We would like to thank Professor Abigail Morrison for her continued patience, advice and support and the Neurobiology of Language group, at the Max-Planck for Psycholinguistics, for valuable discussions and contributions. We acknowledge partial support by the German Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) BMBF Grant 01GQ0420 to BCCN Freiburg, the Helmholtz Alliance on Systems Biology (Germany), the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association, the Helmholtz Portfolio theme 'Supercomputing and Modeling for the Human Brain'. We additionally acknowledge the computing time granted by the JARA-HPC Vergabegremium on the supercomputer JURECA at Forschungszentrum Jülich, used during development.