Proxy or Imposter? A Method and Case Study to Determine the Answer

As the HPC community moves toward exascale, understanding application behavior is more important due to the increase in size and complexity of systems. While applications also grow larger in size and complexity, the need for proxy applications is crucial because of their ease of use and fast execution. They have become an essential aid for system vendors to evaluate new advanced architectures and for application developers to more quickly resolve algorithm and optimization issues. Therefore, proxies must be representative in behavior and function of the applications they mimic. In this work, we present a methodology to understand if a proxy represents a parent application based on a comparison of computational kernels, appropriate dynamic execution characteristics, and hardware bottlenecks. Based on this method, we conclude that miniQMC is a fairly good proxy for QMCPACK, but could be improved based on our analysis.