Study in Usefulness of Middleware-Only Provenance

Data provenance is the lineage of a digital artifact or object. Its capture in workflow-controlled distributed applications is well studied but less is known about quality of provenance captured solely through existing control infrastructures (i.e., middleware frameworks used for high throughput computing). We study completeness of provenance in case where information is only available from the middleware layer. We use WorkQueue to validate our model. Our evaluation shows that provenance captured from a middleware framework is sufficient to represent the existence of output data and trace certain failures independent of the application semantics. We show the method´s limitations as well.