Parameters

Display the helpers

To know what are all the parameters of the software, just do:

>> spyking-circus -h

To know what are all the file formats supported by the software, just do:

>> spyking-circus help -i

To know more what are the parameter of a given file format X, just do

>> spyking-circus X -i

Command line Parameters

The parameters to launch the program are:

  • -m or --method

What are the steps of the algorithm you would like to perform. Defaults steps are:

  1. filtering
  2. whitening
  3. clustering
  4. fitting

Note that filtering is performed only once, and if the code is relaunched on the same data, a flag in the parameter file will prevent the code to filter twice. You can specify only a subset of steps by doing:

>> spyking-circus path/mydata.extension -m clustering,fitting

Note

Extra steps are available, such as merging (see the devoted section documentation on Meta Merging), or even more (documentation on extra steps).

  • -c or --cpu

The number of CPU that will be used by the code, at least during the first three steps. Note that if CUDA is present, and if the GPU are not turned off (with -g 0), GPUs are always preferred to CPU during the fitting phase.

For example, just do:

>> spyking-circus path/mydata.extension -m clustering,fitting -c 10
  • -g or --gpu

The number of GPU that will be used by the code during the fitting phase. If you have CUDA, but a slow GPU and a lot of CPUs (for example 10), you can disable the GPU usage by setting:

>> spyking-circus path/mydata.extension -g 0 -c 10

Warning

Currently, clusters with heterogeneous numbers of GPUs per nodes are not properly handled. Be in touch if interested by the functionality

  • -H or --hostfile

The CPUs used depends on your MPI configuration. If you wan to configure them, you must provide a specific hostfile and do:

>> spyking-circus path/mydata.extension -c 10 -H nodes.hosts

To know more about the host file, see the MPI section documentation on MPI

  • -b or --batch

The code can accept a text file with several commands that will be executed one after the other, in a batch mode. This is interesting for processing several datasets in a row. An example of such a text file commands.txt would simply be:

path/mydata1.extention -c 10
path/mydata2.extention -c 10 -m fitting
path/mydata3.extention -c 10 -m clustering,fitting,converting

Then simply launch the code by doing:

>> spyking-circus commands.txt -b

Warning

When processing files in a batch mode, be sure that the parameters file have been pre-generated. Otherwise, the code will hang asking you to generate them

  • -p or --preview

To be sure that data are properly loaded before filtering everything on site, the code will load only the first second of the data, computes thresholds, and show you an interactive GUI to visualize everything. Please see the documentation on Python GUI

Note

The preview mode does not modify the data file!

  • -r or --result

Launch an interactive GUI to show you, superimposed, the activity on your electrodes and the reconstruction provided by the software. This has to be used as a sanity check. Please see the documentation on Python GUI

  • -o or --output

If you want to generate synthetic benchmarks from a dataset that you have already sorted, this allows you, using the benchmarking mode, to produce a new file output based on what type of benchmarks you want to do (see type)

  • -t or --type

While generating synthetic datasets, you have to chose from one of those three possibilities: fitting, clustering, synchrony. To know more about what those benchmarks are, see the documentation on extra steps

Note

Benchmarks will be better integrated soon into an automatic test suite, use them at your own risks for now. To know more about the additional extra steps, documentation on extra steps

Configuration File

The code, when launched for the first time, generates a parameter file. The default template used for the parameter files is the one located in /home/user/spyking-circus/config.params. You can edit it in advance if you are always using the same setup.

To know more about what is in the configuration file, documentation on the configuration