Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems

11:00 - 11:30 Best Paper
Beyond Guess and Check: Quantifying the Fidelity of Proxy Applications

Si Chen
Emory University, USA

Simon Garcia de Gonzalo, Omar Aaziz, Jeanine Cook
Sandia National Laboratories, USA

Avani Wildani
Cloudflare, USA

Proxy applications are targeted submodels of larger parent applications, designed to represent key characteristics such as the programming model, memory usage, or communication behaviors. Proxy applications are valuable for system design and optimization, offering a more manageable and privacy-preserving alternative to analyzing the parent application, as long as they accurately capture the core characteristics. Creating and maintaining this proxy-parent relationship has been challenging without a consistent means of quantifying proxy fidelity. We address this challenge with Calder, a robust algorithmic toolkit to characterize similarities in HPC application behavior. Calder leverages similarity algorithms to compare application behaviors and uses Laplacian scores with a correlation filter to identify the most important application features. We validate Calder’s similarity results using proxy applications for kernel behavior, network counters, and cross-platform performance. Using the selected features, we show that 75% of the proxies in our suite demonstrate highly convergent behavior with their parents.