Discrete event simulation in the NEURON environment

The response of many types of integrate and fire cells to synaptic input can be computed analytically and their threshold crossing either computed analytically or approximated to high accuracy via Newton approximation. The NEURON simulation environment simulates networks of such artificial spiking neurons using discrete event simulation techniques in which computations are performed only when events are received. Thus computation time is proportional only to the number of events delivered and is independent of the number of cells or problem time.