We are interested in discovering the intrinsic dynamics of parallel applications, which are independent of runtime environment, to aid in the development of appropriate tuning policies, especially dynamic load balancing policies. Based on the novel idea of profiling mesh-based applications at a fine granularity of each mesh element, this paper proposes a synthetic application simulator which is driven by a series of application signatures mapping to the mesh structure. By integrating the ZOLTAN library into the system, our simulator provides a convenient test bed for developing and evaluating load balancing policies.