Ns-2 and its successor ns-3 are discrete-event simulators. Ns-3 is still under development, but offers some interesting characteristics for developers while ns-2 still has a big user base. This paper remarks current differences between both tools from developers point of view. Leaving performance and resources consumption aside, technical issues described in the present paper might help to choose one or another alternative depending of simulation and project management requirements.

Heuristic evaluation is the preferred method to assess usability in games when experts conduct this evaluation. Many heuristics guidelines have been proposed attending to specificities of games but they only focus on specific subsets of games or platforms. In fact, to date the most used guideline to evaluate games usability is still Nielsen's proposal, which is focused on generic software. As a result, most evaluations do not cover important aspects in games such as mobility, multiplayer interactions, enjoyability and playability, etc. To promote the usage of new heuristics adapted to different game and platform aspects we propose a modular approach based on the classification of existing game heuristics using metadata and a tool, MUSE (Meta-heUristics uSability Evaluation tool) for games, which allows a rebuild of heuristic guidelines based on metadata selection in order to obtain a customized list for every real evaluation case. The usage of these new rebuilt heuristic guidelines allows an explicit attendance to a wide range of usability aspects in games and a better detection of usability issues. We preliminarily evaluate MUSE with an analysis of two different games, using both the Nielsen's heuristics and the customized heuristic lists generated by our tool.

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Summary In computer‐aided drug design, software tools are used to narrow down possible drug candidates, thereby reducing the amount of expensive in vitro research, by a process called virtual screening. This process includes large computations that require advanced computing infrastructure; however, using rapidly evolving high‐performance computing platforms can be difficult for biochemists. In this paper, we present a science gateway for virtual screening that has been tailored to the specific needs of our local users. The gateway provides user‐friendly access to distributed computing infrastructures for high‐throughput experiments with a few clicks. Its design is based on the generic layer developed for another gateway for neuroimaging data analysis, including data and computation management, as well as support for its operation. To facilitate scalability, the system architecture allows for adding new computing platforms to the back‐end without affecting the front‐end, from which the user can dynamically choose the preferred infrastructure. This paper describes the user‐centered design process, the system architecture and a performance assessment using gLite grid, Hadoop, and a local cluster. The empirical results show considerable speed‐ups and ease of use, as well as user satisfaction. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Abstract:The use of simulation tools in the development of new Wireless Sensor Networks protocols and applications should be accompanied by minimisation of redundant code and work, making it possible to seamlessly run the same code on simulated and real platforms. This work proposes an architecture for a WSN testing platform that integrates simulation tools in an application-transparent way. The platform will be focused on testing the WSN sink node and providing it with both real and simulated data. The novelty of this approach lies in the use of a flexible network simulation tool not focused on a specific network technology, and the use of generic hardware and open source tools.

The paradigm of virtual world environment arises as an useful tool in diverse fields such as e-Health or education, where they provide a new way of communication and interaction with end users. Networking capabilities play an important role in these systems, which motivates the study and understanding of the gaming network traffic. The present work focuses on Open Wonderland, a system that provides the basis for the development of Networked Virtual Environments with educational or health purposes. The goal of this paper is defining a testing environment and modelling the behaviour of the outgoing network traffic at the server side.