A survey of simulation provenance systems: modeling, capturing, querying, visualization, and advanced utilization

Abstract

Research and education through computer simulation has been actively conducted in various scientific and engineering fields including computational science engineering. Accordingly, there have been a lot of attentions paid to actively utilize provenance information regarding such computer simulations, particularly conducted on high-performance computing and storage resources. In this manuscript we provide a comprehensive survey of a wide range of existing systems to utilize provenance data produced by simulation. Specifically, we (1) categorize extant provenance research articles into several major themes along with well-motivated criteria, (2) grasp and compare primary functions/features of the existing systems in each category, and (3) then ultimately propose new research directions that have never been pioneered before. In particular, we present a taxonomy of scientific platforms regarding provenance support and holistically tabulate the major functionalities and supporting levels of the studied systems. Finally, we conclude this article with a summary of our contributions.