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I'm asking because of this question about network simulation, which currently has two votes to close as off-topic. I would classify it as "computational science for computer science." Certainly it is science; the software is used in many publications of IEEE and similar. And it is clearly computational. The FAQ currently says this site is for computational methods used in technical disciplines.

So it seems to fit the criteria of our site, although I don't know if we have any users who can answer it. Should it be on-topic?

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I think it should be. Network simulation is one of those applications that has come to the fore of computational science in recent years because of its applications to social networking (and its defense, epidemiological, and anti-terrorism variants), and search engines, among other things. These problems have exposed the one-dimensionality of the LINPACK benchmark, and people like David Gleich have been recognized with fellowships in computational science (in David Gleich's case, the von Neumann Fellowship in Computational Science at Sandia National Laboratory).

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  • $\begingroup$ Just to be clear, network simulation and the study of mathematical objects known as graphs (sometimes called networks) are related but different fields. $\endgroup$
    – David Ketcheson
    Jan 21, 2012 at 8:11
  • $\begingroup$ Good call. In any case, I think a glance at the Wikipedia page answers your question with a yes. $\endgroup$
    – Geoff Oxberry
    Jan 21, 2012 at 8:47
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Perhaps the downvotes/votes to close to my question are caused by the apparent simplicity of the question, rather than the topic of the question. All I'm asking for is "how do I print out X?"

Embarrassing as this is, it's preventing me from doing actual research. I'm trying to repeat the work by Hales and Arteconi (the authors of the extension SLACER), who compared the subgraph ratio profiles (cf. network motifs) of their peer-to-peer simulated networks against (a version of) protein structure networks.

I've searched through the Peersim documentation, but haven't found how to print out the network itself.

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  • $\begingroup$ It's not clear to me what the votes to close are all about. We had 4 close votes and a couple downvotes on a question that ended up getting reopened after a debate about whether questions on installing and configuring software were on topic. The topicality of this question seems much more clear-cut to me, as evidenced by the lack of debate (so far); I'm surprised at the close votes myself. $\endgroup$
    – Geoff Oxberry
    Jan 21, 2012 at 23:09

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