HyProv: Hybrid Provenance Management for Scientific Workflows

TL;DR

HyProv is a hybrid provenance management system designed for scientific workflows that combines centralized and federated approaches to enable scalable, real-time, and workflow-aware provenance queries with low latency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid architecture that efficiently manages and queries workflow provenance data at scale, integrating centralized and federated components for improved performance.

Findings

Scales to large workflows with low latency

Answers provenance queries with sub-second response times

Adds modest CPU and memory overhead

Abstract

Provenance plays a crucial role in scientific workflow execution, for instance by providing data for failure analysis, real-time monitoring, or statistics on resource utilization for right-sizing allocations. The workflows themselves, however, become increasingly complex in terms of involved components. Furthermore, they are executed on distributed cluster infrastructures, which makes the real-time collection, integration, and analysis of provenance data challenging. Existing provenance systems struggle to balance scalability, real-time processing, online provenance analytics, and integration across different components and compute resources. Moreover, most provenance solutions are not workflow-aware; by focusing on arbitrary workloads, they miss opportunities for workflow systems where optimization and analysis can exploit the availability of a workflow specification that dictates, to some degree, task execution orders and provides abstractions for physical tasks at a logical level. In this paper, we present HyProv, a hybrid provenance management system that combines centralized and federated paradigms to offer scalable, online, and workflow-aware queries over workflow provenance traces. HyProv uses a centralized component for efficient management of the small and stable workflow-specification-specific provenance, and complements this with federated querying over different scalable monitoring and provenance databases for the large-scale execution logs. This enables low-latency access to current execution data. Furthermore, the design supports complex provenance queries, which we exemplify for the workflow system Airflow in combination with the resource manager Kubernetes. Our experiments indicate that HyProv scales to large workflows, answers provenance queries with sub-second latencies, and adds only modest CPU and memory overhead to the cluster.