Synapse: Synthetic Application Profiler and Emulator

TL;DR

Synapse is a versatile tool that profiles and emulates application workloads to accurately reproduce their behavior across diverse high-performance and distributed computing environments.

Contribution

It introduces a platform-independent profiler and emulator that can tune and reproduce workload characteristics with high fidelity, surpassing limitations of real applications.

Findings

High-fidelity profiling captures application characteristics accurately.

Emulation reproduces application behavior across different environments.

Synapse enables workload characterization and reproduction at multiple levels of granularity.

Abstract

Motivated by the need to emulate workload execution characteristics on high-performance and distributed heterogeneous resources, we introduce Synapse. Synapse is used as a proxy application (or "representative application") for real workloads, with the advantage that it can be tuned in different ways and dimensions, and also at levels of granularity that are not possible with real applications. Synapse has a platform-independent application profiler, and has the ability to emulate profiled workloads on a variety of resources. Experiments show that the automated profiling performed using Synapse captures an application's characteristics with high fidelity. The emulation of an application using Synapse can reproduce the application's execution behavior in the original run-time environment, and can also reproduce those behaviors on different run-time environments.