[Installation] GSOC 2026 help Parvathi_Vinod

[asoplata]

Describe the problem to us.

(This is a recreation of the request for installation help from this INCF Neurostars page GSOC thread here https://neurostars.org/t/gsoc-2026-project-15-hnn-human-neocortical-neurosolver-projects-refactoring-synaptic-behavior-in-hnn-core/35574/2 )

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

What steps did you follow to install?

Steps I followed:

Created and activated a virtual environment

Installed hnn-core
This installed successfully.

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!

Error message

Skipping link: none of the wheel’s tags (cp39-cp39-manylinux_2_27_x86_64 …)
are compatible

OS

Windows (native)

[asoplata]

Hello Parvathi,

In your case, I recommend you follow our the pip Package Installation section of our Installation Page here. Inside that section, I recommend you use either WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) or follow the " pip on Windows (native, not WSL)" path. The order that you install HNN-Core on native Windows is very important:

1. first Anaconda or Python,
2. then NEURON,
3. then HNN-Core itself.

NEURON is required for HNN-Core so python -c "import neuron" must work inside your environment before you can successfully install HNN-Core.

In general, we strongly recommend using WSL on Windows since the installation is easier and you can enable MPI usage for a big speedup. On native Windows, I believe Anaconda environments automatically detect a successful installation of NEURON, but I have not tested venv usage on Windows in that case. Also, I would recommend installing NEURON on native Windows for version 8.2.7 here https://github.com/neuronsimulator/nrn/releases/tag/8.2.7 instead of 8.2.2, which may help with things.

Please let me know if you continue to have issues, and thanks for your interest!