Scientific Workflow Repeatability through Cloud-Aware Provenance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for ensuring scientific workflow repeatability in Cloud environments by capturing and utilizing Cloud infrastructure provenance to re-provision resources and re-execute workflows.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach to collect Cloud infrastructure provenance and map it to workflow provenance for improved repeatability in Cloud-based scientific workflows.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated through initial prototype evaluation

Effective collection of Cloud infrastructure and workflow provenance

Potential for enhanced workflow repeatability in Cloud environments

Abstract

The transformations, analyses and interpretations of data in scientific workflows are vital for the repeatability and reliability of scientific workflows. This provenance of scientific workflows has been effectively carried out in Grid based scientific workflow systems. However, recent adoption of Cloud-based scientific workflows present an opportunity to investigate the suitability of existing approaches or propose new approaches to collect provenance information from the Cloud and to utilize it for workflow repeatability in the Cloud infrastructure. The dynamic nature of the Cloud in comparison to the Grid makes it difficult because resources are provisioned on-demand unlike the Grid. This paper presents a novel approach that can assist in mitigating this challenge. This approach can collect Cloud infrastructure information along with workflow provenance and can establish a mapping between them. This mapping is later used to re-provision resources on the Cloud. The repeatability of the workflow execution is performed by: (a) capturing the Cloud infrastructure information (virtual machine configuration) along with the workflow provenance, and (b) re-provisioning the similar resources on the Cloud and re-executing the workflow on them. The evaluation of an initial prototype suggests that the proposed approach is feasible and can be investigated further.