Abstract
Realistic, relevant, and reproducible experiments often need input traces collected from real-world environments. In this work, we focus on traces of workflows-common in datacenters, clouds, and HPC infrastructures. We show that the state-of-the-art in using workflow-traces raises important issues: (1) the use of realistic traces is infrequent and (2) the use of realistic, open-access traces even more so. Alleviating these issues, we introduce the Workflow Trace Archive (WTA), an open-access archive of workflow traces from diverse computing infrastructures and tooling to parse, validate, and analyze traces. The WTA includes > 48 million workflows captured from > 10 computing infrastructures, representing a broad diversity of trace domains and characteristics. To emphasize the importance of trace diversity, we characterize the WTA contents and analyze in simulation the impact of trace diversity on experiment results. Our results indicate significant differences in characteristics, properties, and workflow structures between workload sources, domains, and fields.
Highlights
WORKFLOWS are already a significant part of private datacenter and public cloud infrastructures [1], [2]
We identify a comprehensive set of requirements for a workflow trace archive
We identify as requirement that an archive must include a diverse set of traces to cover a broad spectrum of workflow sizes, structures, and other characteristics, including both general characteristics to many domains and fields, and idiosyncratic characteristics corresponding to only one domain or field
Summary
WORKFLOWS are already a significant part of private datacenter and public cloud infrastructures [1], [2]. Since the introduction of commercial clouds, clients have increasingly started to ask for better QoS, and in particular have started to increasingly express non-functional requirement (NFRs) such as availability, privacy, and security demands in traces [4], [17] This leads us to research question RQ-2: How to support sharing workflow traces in a common, unified format? ACM introduced artifact review and badges to stimulate the release of both software and data artifacts for reproducibility and verification purposes [18] We add to this community-effort ours, which is scientific in nature: RQ-3: What is the impact of the source and domain of a trace on the characteristics of workflows?. All data used in this survey is available as open-access data and can be used to verify and extend this survey
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