This package provides functionality which are common to front ends that translate application level programs into executables which run on a SpiNNaker machine.

Requirements

In addition to a standard Python installation, this package depends on:

numpy
SpiNNUtilities
SpiNNMachine
PACMAN
SpiNNMan
spalloc

These dependencies can be installed using pip:

pip install numpy
pip install SpiNNUtilities SpiNNMachine PACMAN SpiNNMan spalloc

If you want to use the spinnaker_router_provenance_mapper command line tool to visualise the traffic on SpiNNaker boards caused by your simulations, you should install this package using:

pip install "SpiNNFrontEndCommon[plotting]"

This will additionally install matplotlib and seaborn to do the actual plotting, as well as configuring the script.

Visualising SpiNNaker Board Network Traffic

To get plots of the traffic in your simulation, use the spinnaker_router_provenance_mapper command line tool (installed as described above), passing in the name of a provenance database (usually called provenance.sqlite3 and created within the run's reporting folders) that contains the raw data. This will produce a number of graphs as images in your current directory; those have fixed file-names.

spinnaker_router_provenance_mapper my_code/.../provenance.sqlite3

An example of the sort of map that might be produced is:

The P2P traffic being mapped is mainly used for system boot and control. The white square is due to a chip on that SpiNNaker board being marked as deactivated.