Re-provisioning of Cloud-Based Execution Infrastructure Using the Cloud-Aware Provenance to Facilitate Scientific Workflow Execution Reproducibility

Provenance has been considered as a means to achieve scientific workflow reproducibility to verify the workflow processes and results. Cloud computing provides a new computing paradigm for the workflow execution by offering a dynamic and scalable environment with on-demand resource provisioning. In the absence of Cloud infrastructure information, achieving workflow reproducibility on the Cloud becomes a challenge. This paper presents a framework, named ReCAP, to capture the Cloud infrastructure information and to interlink it with the workflow provenance to establish the Cloud-Aware Provenance (CAP). This paper identifies different scenarios of using the Cloud for workflow execution and presents different mapping approaches. The reproducibility of the workflow execution is performed by re-provisioning the similar Cloud resources using CAP and re-executing the workflow; and by comparing the outputs of workflows. Finally, this paper also presents the evaluation of ReCAP in terms of captured provenance, workflow execution time and workflow output comparison.