Preparing for the Future—Rethinking Proxy Applications

A considerable amount of research and engineering went into designing proxy applications, which represent common high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, to co-design and evaluate the current generation of supercomputers, e.g., RIKEN’s supercomputer Fugaku, ANL’s Aurora, or ORNL’s Frontier. This process was necessary to standardize the procurement while avoiding duplicated effort at each HPC center to develop their own benchmarks. Unfortunately, proxy applications force HPC centers and providers (vendors) into an undesirable state of rigidity, in contrast to the fast-moving trends of current technology and future heterogeneity. To accommodate an extremely heterogeneous future, we have to reconsider how to co-design supercomputers during the next decade, and avoid repeating past mistakes.