Implementation and evaluation of a protocol for recording process documentation in the presence of failures

Abstract

The provenance of a particular data item is the process that led to that piece of data. Previous work has enabled the creation of detailed representation of past executions for determining provenance, termed process documentation. However, current solutions to recording process documentation assume a failure free environment. Failures result in process documentation not being recorded, thereby causing the loss of evidence that a process occurred. We have designed F-PReP, a protocol to guarantee the recording of process documentation in the presence of failures. This paper discusses its implementation and evaluates its performance. The result reveals that it introduces acceptable overhead.