Synapse: Synthetic Application Profiler and Emulator

We introduce Synapse motivated by the needs to 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 resources. Synapse is used as a proxy application (or "representative application") for real workloads, with the added advantage that it can be tuned in different ways and 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 behaviour in the original runtime environment, as well as reproducing properties when used in a different run-time environments.