1. A method to characterize two or more applications, the method comprising: collecting resource utilization trace data from the two or more applications simultaneously running on one or more computational devices; determining an intrinsic dimensionality of the collected trace data, the intrinsic dimensionality representing a number of predominant features that substantially characterize the collected trace data; characterizing each application's workload based on the determined intrinsic dimensionality, wherein each application's workload comprises CPU utilization, memory usage, and device input/output usage; detrending the resource utilization trace data for one of the two or more applications to remove at least one of a plurality of characteristics of the corresponding application's workload; and constructing a trace for the one of the two or more applications based on remaining characteristics of the application's workload.