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USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association

2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Abstract

Pp. 43–56 of the Proceedings

Provenance-Aware Storage Systems

Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy, David A. Holland, Uri Braun, and Margo Seltzer, Harvard University

Abstract

A Provenance-Aware Storage System (PASS) is a storage system that automatically collects and maintains provenance or lineage, the complete history or ancestry of an item. We discuss the advantages of treating provenance as meta-data collected and maintained by the storage system, rather than as manual annotations stored in a separately administered database. We describe a PASS implementation, discussing the challenges it presents, performance cost it incurs, and the new functionality it enables. We show that with reasonable overhead, we can provide useful functionality not available in today's file systems or provenance management systems.
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Last changed: 15 Sept. 2006 ch