Application Characterization Using Oxbow Toolkit and PADS Infrastructure

Characterizing the behavior of a scientific application and its associated proxy application is essential for determining whether the proxy application actually does mimic the full application. To support our ongoing characterization activities, we have developed the Oxbow toolkit and an associated data store infrastructure for collecting, storing, and querying this characterization information. This paper presents recent updates to the Oxbow toolkit and introduces the Oxbow project's Performance Analytics Data Store (PADS). To demonstrate the possible insights when using the toolkit and data store, we compare the characterizations of several full and proxy applications, along with the High Performance Linpack (HPL) and High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmarks. Using techniques such as cluster visualizations of PADS data across many experiments, we found that the results show unexpected similarities and differences between proxy applications, and a greater similarity of proxy applications to HPCG than to HPL along many dimensions.