What is the most scalable way to animate large amount of objects?

Question

I'm trying to animate the activity of neurons in a large scale spiking neural network. I'm trying to make it as efficient as possible because it has to scale well and run smoothly for atleast 30,000 objects and preferably up to millions, from the Python API.

My efforts up to now have focussed on creating the neurons efficiently and I've ended up with:

1 icosphere mesh
1 mesh linked to 1 Emission material
n objects with their own position linked to the mesh

For the animation I've found out about relevant 2 techniques:

Keyframes
Nodes

But I haven't been able to find a way where I can do it for the objects individually since they share their mesh and material. It seems like for both of these I would have to create at least n materials or nodes so that I can animate the intensity of each object independently.

So the big question: Are there better ways to animate a property of a large group of objects, ideally where I can use 1 shared resource, passing it a vector with a value for each object?

Edit: Is a frame_change handler as proposed here efficient? Is swapping out the materials of my n objects computationally efficient?

First though... preferably using one big object with many neurons and using vertex color for the material animation. — lemon, Sep 17 '20 at 07:53
Do you have an illustration of what would be the final result? Is it a computer NN or real one? — lemon, Sep 17 '20 at 07:56
https://i.imgur.com/D6aSsbH.png All of the spheres' emission intensity should be animated. In this picture they're not emission mats yet :) — Robin De Schepper, Sep 17 '20 at 08:00
@lemon I'm animating simulation results of a model of the cerebellum, so a real simulated one ^_^ — Robin De Schepper, Sep 17 '20 at 08:06
Oh also, in this picture you see I don't have 1 mat and 1 mesh but m mats and m meshes with n x m objects, because I have m different neuron populations — Robin De Schepper, Sep 17 '20 at 08:16
Yes my idea was to use vertex color to drive the shader (so possibly, one material or/and one mesh should be possible) — lemon, Sep 17 '20 at 08:18
Object color? https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/185314/15543 — batFINGER, Sep 17 '20 at 09:33
Object color looks very promising! I added an Object Info node, connected Color to a Vector node to scale it with a constant representing the max intensity and connected that to the Strength of my Emission node! — Robin De Schepper, Sep 17 '20 at 09:50

What is the most scalable way to animate large amount of objects?

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