ns, the free open-source network simulator, is the de-facto standard for research over a wide variety of networking areas. ns version 2 is widely used across both academia and industry as a way of designing, testing and evaluating new and existing protocols and architectures, and has also proven a very useful tool for teaching purposes. ns version 3 is under active development.

The Workshop on ns-2 (WNS2) is a two-day event held in conjunction with VALUETOOLS 2008, the Third International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, during the week of 20-24 October 2008 in Athens, Greece. WNS2 2008 follows the success of the first WNS2 workshop in 2006. A tutorial day on Thursday 23 October is followed by presentation of reviewed papers on Friday 24 October 2008.
The main goals of this second WNS2 workshop are to bring together networking researchers from both academia and industry, to discuss recent advances, to identify future directions in network simulation, and to foster interdisciplinary collaborative research in this area. The workshop aims to emphasise the future evolution of ns-2, now that ns-3 is under active development, and its extension in novel research areas and networking technologies and scenarios.
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Measure, measure, measure: It’s one of the pieces of advice repeatedly doled out to companies looking to make their datacenters more energy-efficient. Without question, it’s a sound suggestion; if you don’t know where you’re starting from, how do you know where you should go or whether you’ve made any progress ?

The real difficulty, however, lies in the measuring process. It can be time consuming. And once you’ve thoroughly measured the temperature, humidity, airflow, and energy consumption throughout your facility, you have a valuable snapshot — but just for a while. As time passes and changes occur within your datacenter — new equipment is added, a tile plate comes loose, a CRAC unit goes down — you might not realize you have a hot spot until the next time you take a measurement (or a system overheats).

More info here.