Network Science Experimentation Scale and composition in a virtualized experimentation environment

The Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA) conducts multi-genre network science experimentation that attempts to capture the fundamental underlying commonalities across the social, information and communication networks. Due to the complex nature of network science, there exists a broad variance in experimentation requirements in regard to scalability, fidelity and tractability. In response to this diversity, the NS-CTA has leveraged cloud-based virtual experimentation environments to achieve their experimentation goals. In this paper we consider how the network science specific features exposed by the virtualized experimentation environments affect the scaling and composition of simulation based experiment designs.