HFProxy: Synthesizing Portable and High-Fidelity Proxy Applications for MPI Programs

Proxy applications play a fundamental role in high-performance computing (HPC) by providing simplified representations of production applications for performance evaluation, bottleneck analysis, and optimization. Developing high-fidelity proxy applications remains a labor-intensive process, while existing automated methods often failing to maintain fidelity across diverse hardware and software platforms. To address these challenges, we propose HFProxy, a novel framework for synthesizing portable and high-fidelity proxy applications for Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs. HFProxy traces both communication and computation events in MPI programs, models representative computation and memory access patterns, and employs a grammar-based approach to compress trace data. By combining these techniques with contention-aware performance modeling and workload shrinkage, HFProxy generates lightweight proxies that faithfully replicate the performance characteristics of the original programs across platforms. We evaluate HFProxy on a diverse set of MPI programs, demonstrating its ability to achieve high fidelity with time prediction errors under 8% across platforms. HFProxy also enables up to 10-fold workload shrinkage while maintaining critical performance metrics. Additionally, case studies show that HFProxy provides actionable insights for performance analysis and bottleneck diagnosis, proving its utility for both developers and HPC system administrators.