The Virtual Brain is gearing up towards a big new release in summer 2021! Core parts of the software have been completely rewritten to enable easier usage for scripting users, make room for exciting new features and be much, much faster!

Today we're offering an Alpha release of TVB 2.1a1 for direct download & testing:

• Download for Windows (1 GB)
• Download for macOS (750 MB)
• Download for Linux (1 GB)

UPDATE: The Alpha test phase has ended on March 29, 2021 and the downloads have been disabled.

Our early release platforms on DockerHub and PyPI also include these latest changes.

What's new in this Alpha release

Since the last version 1.5.8, we've implemented 276 improvements and bug fixes. One of the biggest changes: TVB is now compatible with Python 3.

We have completely re-written the traits system in the scientific library, by splitting the basic concepts (types, storage, DB indexing, web GUI) in a better way. This yields smaller files with clearer code, thus making them easier to work with for our scripting users and contributors.

We're proud to have increased the speed of the simulator by 200%.

Other notable changes:

• The framework has been adapted to the new traits system and standardized to use only H5 files for storage.
• Analyzers in the library are now functions instead of classes.
• The Simulator page has been improved to resemble a Wizard workflow.
• We have added a REST API and also a client SDK for the Simulator, installable via PyPI (tvb-rest-client).
• A new export button on datatypes allows downloading a datatype together with its references (so a Connectivity stays linked to the region mapping).

As this is an Alpha realease, a bunch of smaller features from version 1.5.8 aren't available yet, e.g. Portlets.

How to test this release

We have built in automatic migration of your data to the new storage architecture but you need to have installed version 1.5.8 before installing this new Alpha version! We recommend a data backup anyway before you install the Alpha version.

We would love to hear feedback from developers and scientists about this Alpha release. Please tell us in our public discussion forum how you like it, if you found bugs and how it performs in your scientific tasks!