Workflows are critical for scientific discovery. However, the sophistication, heterogeneity, and scale of workflows make building, testing, and optimizing them increasingly challenging. Furthermore, their complexity and heterogeneity make performance reproducibility hard. In this paper, we propose workflow mini-apps as a tool to address the challenges in building and testing workflows while controlling the fidelity of representing realworld workflows. Workflow mini-apps are deployed and run on various HPC systems and architectures without workflow-specific constraints. We offer insight into their design and implementation, providing an analysis of their performance and reproducibility. Workflow mini-apps thus advance the science of workflows by providing simple, portable, and managed (fidelity) representations of otherwise complex and difficult-to-control real workflows.
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