overall performance is given by the superposition of several time series that in some instances are not independent a wide range of important problems require analysis of the entire system including resource assignment queuing networks and system behavior analysis since a single application analysis is itself a complex task modeling the whole system behavior is even more difficult the reason is that considering each application as a time series forms a high dimensional structure in accordance with various embodiments of the invention methods and apparatuses are described that provide for computational analysis including computational utilization analysis and reporting the computational analysis can be performed on a single stand alone computer or a computer system having one or more computers coupled directly or indirectly via a computer network in order to characterize the workload of applications in a shared utility computing environment principal component analysis pca is applied to a central process unit cpu utilization dataset this dataset can be extracted from a server or other computational device a workload model which is also referred to as a utilization workload model is generated using a small number of features that are derived from classification of applications based on some of their predominant feature s in other embodiments of the invention computational analysis includes but is not limited to classifying applications based on one or more features detrending applications by removing one or more features or features from computer traces in order to focus on specific trends caused by one or more features characterizing application workloads and generating synthetic workloads in order to.