SciInc: A Container Runtime for Incremental Recomputation

The conduct of reproducible science improves when computations are portable and verifiable. A container runtime provides an isolated environment for running computations and thus is useful for porting applications on new machines. Current container engines, such as LXC and Docker, however, do not track provenance, which is essential for verifying computations. In this paper, we present SciInc, a container runtime that tracks the provenance of computations during container creation. We show how container engines can use audited provenance data for efficient container replay. SciInc observes inputs to computations, and, if they change, propagates the changes, re-using partially memoized computations and data that are identical across replay and original run. We chose light-weight data structures for storing the provenance trace to maintain the invariant of shareable and portable container runtime. To determine the effectiveness of change propagation and memoization, we compared popular container technology and incremental recomputation methods using published data analysis experiments.