The authors propose (1) a methodology for performance modeling and simulation of distributed simulators, (2) a simulator architecture called the hierarchical multiport simulator (HMS) which is an abstract simulator of distributed simulators, and (3) a technique to design a simulation system to determine distributed simulator performance based on experimental aspects. Additionally, their experiments indicate that simulation approaches are suited for finding the optimal decomposition levels of given distributed simulator models. This is done by comparing performance measures such as the average run time or the product of the average run time and the complexity.