Back in 2010 in Cargese, for the SimGrid Users' Days, I made a presentation on the technical side of using SimGrid. This point of view is probably interesting to a lot of people, maybe even more than the scientific approach used in the tutorial. It was for example very well received during the Kickoff meeting. Unfortunately, these slides became somehow out of date on some points since then.
That is why I (partially) refreshed these slides recently. That's not perfect yet (it is rather terse on how to write a platform file, for example), but here we go.