Actor Provenance Capture With Ganglia

Abstract

Provenance is generally defined as the documentation of a process that leads to some result, and has long been recognised as being fundamental to the development of problem solving mechanisms within Grid environments. The knowledge of how a particular result has been derived is just as important as the result itself within many e-Science experiments. We present the concept of "actor" provenance, which provides detailed information concerning the state of an actor at a particular time. We also demonstrate how actor provenance differs from "interaction" provenance between actors. We describe how actor provenance may be represented and recorded using monitoring tools such as ganglia. This is explained using a number of use cases in a Bio-Diversity application.