Re: Your (excellent) questions. (Score 1)

My questions: (1) What are some interesting computational neuroscience simulation problems that an individual with a workstation class PC can work on? ** These come up more frequently than you might think. Even what you'd think of as a regular home or office PC can do a lot with 8-16 gigs of memory, let alone amounts beyond that. I'd suggest that you start looking at http://www.kaggle.com/ as a place to start. Also, start looking at the discussion groups that you can find on (I hate it, but use it) LinkedIn. I prefer the discussion groups that you can get at the American Statistical Association, and even the listserve discussion groups for various statistical software packages (e.g., R, Stata, SAS). (2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data? ** It depends on the problem being examined, and who "owns" the data. For Kaggle competitions, the data is given to you. For other projects, a lot of data is becoming "open sourced" so that people can get to it publicly. So, that's a qualified yes for some things, and a no for others. (3) I am familiar with (but not used extensively) simulators like Neuron, Genesis etc. Other than these and Matlab, what other software should I get? ** I tend to lean on Stata and R. Will be moving over to R after finishing current research project. It depends on the areas you want to examine. If you're willing to deal with the "learning curve" for R, I'd go with that. It's free and has a fantastic community. (4) Where online or offline, can I network with other DIY Computational Neuroscience enthusiasts? ** I hate LinkedIn, but I use it in my own field. You might try that, as well as G+ initially. I'd also be looking at the American Statistical Association and related professional groups. The listserves for various statistical software packages are good, but they get nasty about off topic posts (tangential to the use of the software) ** I think that the related StackOverflow forums would be very good. I've had good results with them.