Provenance-Aware Storage Systems

Abstract

Provenance is a type of meta-data that describes the history or ancestry of an object. Although provenance is typically manually generated and stored in a stand-alone database, we make the case that it must be managed by the storage system. In this paper, we describe provenance-aware storage systems (PASS), a new class of storage system that automatically tracks provenance. A PASS takes responsibility for recording provenance meta-data for the objects stored on it and maintaining that provenance over time. We predict that within the next decade, all storage systems will be expected to be provenance-aware. We describe a PASS prototype, demonstrate that tracking provenance does not incur significant overhead, and present comments from a prospective user indicating that provenance-aware storage helps scientists get their jobs done better than is currently possible.