The NeuroSetup.stimulate() function expects a dictionary of SpikeLists. The SpikeLists use logical addresses as ids. On function call, these addresses are translated to physical addresses and sent to the setup. The same happens backwards on the readout of activity from the setup.

All of this process involves considerable computation and for stimulus spanning across large populations slows down the stimulation and readout process. This is especially visible when you want to do real-time demos.

Since the LogicalAddressing is really only for the purposes of plotting, why not just use the PhysicalAddresses for creating and sending the stimulus ? This has several advantages

1. No processing required at the time of stimulation or readout. You only require to process the spikes when you are interested in visualizing the spikes.
2. The Input object used to stimulate is very cryptic as it is now {channel:SpikeList}, since the true essence of pyNCS is to not bother users about the channel information, a simple SpikeList would be better input representation.
3. This was earlier not possible since ligical addresses are not unique across a multichip setup. But with the use of PhysicalAddresses a single SpikeList object that includes all the input spikes is easily possible.

I must also emphasize that if you all agree to this suggestion, we need to make a SMOOTH transition and make it optional for now because there is a good chance that this enhancement will break old code (although it was intended for the greater good of mankind ;) ).