A Method for Constructing Research Data Provenance in High-Performance Computing Systems

Research must be reproducible to be verifiable. Provenance, which describes how data was produced, is one of the metadata that can improve reproducibility. In this paper, we propose a method to construct the provenance of research data produced in high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Our method can construct a high-level and user-perspective provenance by integrating information available in HPC systems, such as a workload manager, with low-level data about running programs' behavior captured in an operating system kernel. The method enables users of HPC systems to collect the provenance without modifying assets such as programs and scripts.