Optimizations for neuron time warp(NTW) for stochastic reaction-diffusion models of neurons

Abstract

The intracellular calcium signaling pathways of a neuron consist of biochemical reactions along with molecular diffusion. It is known that stochastic discrete event simulation of these pathways provides a more detailed understanding of the pathways than deterministic simulators because they capture behavior at a molecular level. Our research employs a parallel discrete event simulation simulator, Neuron Time Warp (NTW), which is intended for use for the simulation of neurons. In previous work we built a discrete event Ca2+ wave model. However, we did not achieve the expected performance because of an imbalance in the computation between the area of the neuron covered by the Ca2+ wave and the remaining area of the neuron. In this paper we describe a dynamic load balancing algorithm and a dynamic window control algorithm for NTW. We make use of Q-learning to determine the basic parameters of the algorithm. Using this algorithm we obtained an improvement in the performance of the simulator of up to 30%.