A Provenance-Aware Storage System (PASS) is a storage system that automatically collects and maintains provenance or lineage, the complete history or ancestry of an item. We discuss the advantages of treating provenance as meta-data collected and maintained by the storage system, rather than as manual annotations stored in a separately administered database. We describe a PASS implementation, discussing the challenges it presents, performance cost it incurs, and the new functionality it enables. We show that with reasonable overhead, we can provide useful functionality not available in today's file systems or provenance management systems.
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