Establishing a miniapp as a programmability proxy

Miniapps serve as test beds for prototyping and evaluating new algorithms, data structures, and programming models before incorporating such changes into larger applications. For the miniapp to accurately predict how a prototyped change would affect a larger application it is necessary that the miniapp be shown to serve as a proxy for that larger application. Although many benchmarks claim to proxy the performance for a set of large applications, little work has explored what criteria must be met for a benchmark to serve as a proxy for examining programmability. In this poster we describe criteria that can be used to establish that a miniapp serves as a performance and programmability proxy.