Mimesys: Generating Realistic Executable Testing Environments from Resource Usage Traces | USENIX

Mimesys: Generating Realistic Executable Testing Environments from Resource Usage Traces

Donghyun Kim, Zichao Hu, Joydeep Biswas, Aditya Akella, and Daehyeok Kim, The University of Texas at Austin

Testing applications under realistic resource contention is challenging because production workloads are often inaccessible due to privacy and proprietary concerns. Existing approaches either use simplistic resource stressors that fail to capture temporal dynamics and multi-resource interactions, rely on limited benchmark suites, or require exhaustive per-application profiling. This paper explores an alternative direction: Synthesizing executable workloads from resource usage traces to reproduce realistic colocation scenarios.

We present Mimesys, a system that transforms time-series resource usage traces into executable workloads that emulate resource contention patterns. Mimesys represents emulated workloads as compositions of resource stressors and employs a diffusion-based generative model to learn the inverse mapping from traces to stressor compositions. We introduce two key ideas: state-aware conditioning that conditions generation on both target traces and prior system state to capture temporal dependencies, and execution-driven alignment that adapts the model to real application patterns using direct execution feedback without requiring ground-truth labels. Our evaluation shows that Mimesys achieves up to 5.5× higher trace similarity and reproduces application performance under contention 2.6× more accurately than baselines.

OSDI '26 Open Access Sponsored by<br>King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Open Access Media<br>USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX<br>@inproceedings {318614,

author = {Donghyun Kim and Zichao Hu and Joydeep Biswas and Aditya Akella and Daehyeok Kim},

title = {Mimesys: Generating Realistic Executable Testing Environments from Resource Usage Traces},

booktitle = {20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 26)},

year = {2026},

isbn = {978-1-939133-55-7},

address = {Seattle, WA},

pages = {2205--2221},

url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi26/presentation/kim-donghyun},

publisher = {USENIX Association},

month = jul

Download

Kim PDF