Special issue on Cloud Simulation

The recent steep growth of cloud computing, together with the high interest in the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm, has led to a strong investment in the deployment of simulators on top of public or private cloud infrastructures. Many users of simulation tools are willing to run their simulations on the cloud for the savings that they can obtain, avoiding the cost of building up a local computation cluster and enabling the access to a huge amount of resources that can be rented (and disposed) in every moment. The scope of this special issue is to present the state-of-the-art research covering a variety of concepts on: (i) simulation and cloud computing; (ii) simulation as a service; (iii) simulation of cloud computing infrastructures. Furthermore, it also aims to provide future trends and directions on the multiple interactions between cloud computing and simulation. For example, the design, implementation and performance analysis of cloud-based simulators and modeling/implementation of large-scale simulations of cloud infrastructures. Eight papers are selected from earlier submissions; all of them have been reviewed by qualified anonymous referees according to the practices of this journal.