New distributed computing services allow users to leverage the computing power of thousands of hosts on the Internet. These services could potentially speed up simulations or allow developers to simulate more parameters. Most current simulators concentrate on testing for performance. However, in many systems a larger problem is security, in particular intrusion and denial of service. A simulator may not be able to launch a sophisticated attack, but most exploited vulnerabilities result from incorrectly checked arguments and race conditions.
Most current simulators require protocols to be re-implemented inside the simulator.
This is a tedious and error-prone process. A few simulators implement emulation, where the simulator interfaces with real hosts running a live system, thus requiring minimal additional work by the developer. However, these simulators do not integrate the other features described here. Most current simulators have a few fixed degrees of fidelity. Instead, a continuous fidelity simulator would allow the developer to smoothly trade-off simulation time and accuracy in each simulation run and also in different parts of the simulated network in the same run.