We introduce a family of simulators for I/O-intensive distributed or parallel applications, and a methodology that permits selecting the most efficient simulator meeting a given user-defined accuracy requirement. This methodology consists of a series of tests to choose an appropriate simulation based on the attributes of the application. In addition, each simulator provides two estimates of application execution time: the minimum expected time and the maximum. We present the results of applying our methodology to existing applications, and show that we can accurately simulate applications tens to hundreds of tunes faster than the application execution times.