Synapse: Synthetic Application Profiler and Emulator

TL;DR

Synapse is a platform-independent tool that profiles and emulates workload characteristics on heterogeneous resources, enabling high-fidelity reproduction and analysis of real application behaviors across different environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, tunable profiler and emulator that accurately captures and reproduces application workload characteristics on diverse computing resources.

Findings

High-fidelity workload characterization through automated profiling.

Effective emulation reproduces application behavior across environments.

Enables representative application development for heterogeneous systems.

Abstract

We introduce Synapse motivated by the needs to estimate and emulate workload execution characteristics on high-performance and distributed heterogeneous resources. Synapse has a platform independent application profiler, and the ability to emulate profiled workloads on a variety of heterogeneous resources. Synapse is used as a proxy application (or "representative application") for real workloads, with the added advantage that it can be tuned at arbitrary levels of granularity in ways that are simply not possible using real applications. Experiments show that automated profiling using Synapse represents application characteristics with high fidelity. Emulation using Synapse can reproduce the application behavior in the original runtime environment, as well as reproducing properties when used in a different run-time environments.