ASC Co-design Proxy App Strategy
The NNSA labs representing the ASC program are coordinating on the development and release of a portfolio of proxy applications to be used in co-design. While each lab will develop their own set of proxy apps that represent the applications and algorithms of interest to them, we propose a common set of criteria to describe and measure proxy apps, and a strategy aimed at minimizing duplication and maximizing impact across the entire ASC proxy app portfolio. Proxy application (or proxy apps for short) is a catchall term for the simplification of characteristics of real applications that are of interest to DOE. These proxy apps are used in the co-design process as concrete examples for component and system designers to understand our software requirements. The proxy apps are generally openly available to the co-design community and, unlike benchmarks, are intended to facilitate the two-way communication required by co-design to optimally evaluate trade-offs in the system hardware, and inform the developer community of programming best practices for emerging architectures.