A benchmark suite and performance analysis of user-space provenance collectors

Computational provenance has many important applications, especially to reproducibility. System-level provenance collectors can track provenance data without requiring the user to change anything about their application. However, system-level provenance collectors have performance overheads, and, worse still, different works use different and incomparable benchmarks to assess their performance overhead. This work identifies user-space system-level provenance collectors in prior work, collates the benchmarks, and evaluates each collector on each benchmark. We use benchmark minimization to select a minimal subset of benchmarks, which can be used as goalposts for future work on system-level provenance collectors.