GSOC 2026 Project #15 : HNN (Human Neocortical Neurosolver) Projects : Refactoring synaptic behavior in HNN-Core

Hello,

My name is Parvathi and I am a master’s student in Biomedical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. I am interested in this project, and was trying to set up HNN-core locally so that I could run some example simulations in VS Code on my laptop, but I was running into issues while installing NEURON, which I understand is required for HNN-core.

Environment - OS: Windows, Python: 3.11,Virtual environment created using venv

Steps I followed:

  1. Created and activated a virtual environment

  2. Installed hnn-core
    This installed successfully.

  3. I then attempted to install NEURON using pip: pip install neuron
    However, pip was returning:
    ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement neuron
    ERROR: No matching distribution found for neuron

Running pip with verbose output shows messages like:
Skipping link: none of the wheel’s tags (cp39-cp39-manylinux_2_27_x86_64 …)
are compatible
which seems to indicate that the available wheels are built for Linux rather than Windows.

I had previously installed NEURON 8.2.2 using the Windows installer, but import neuron was failing inside my virtual environment and throwing this error: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘neuron’

So I just wanted to know if there an easier/ recommended way to install NEURON so that it works with hnn-core in a Python virtual environment on Windows? Also, should NEURON be installed through pip, the Windows installer, or through some other way?

Also please do let me know if I made any mistakes in the process that I followed.

Thank you!

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