1.1 What does this software do?

BigNetSim is an effort to simulate large current and future computer systems to study the behavior of applications developed for those systems. BigNetSim could be used to study

• new types of interconnection topologies and routing algorithms along with different types of switching architecture.
• application performance on different machines. This uses the API provided in Section to run the application on some number of processors on some machine and generate (dump) all events (entry method executions or message send/recv). BigNetSim is used to model the machine that needs to be studied for this application and these logs are then fed into this simulation, and it predicts the performance of this application.

So, the two important uses are studying interconnection networks and performance prediction for applications.