Recording Process Documentation for Provenance

Scientific and business communities are adopting large-scale distributed systems as a means to solve a wide range of resource-intensive tasks. These communities also have requirements in terms of provenance. We define the provenance of a result produced by a distributed system as the process that led to that result. This paper describes a protocol for recording documentation of a distributed system's execution. The distributed protocol guarantees that documentation with characteristics suitable for accurately determining the provenance of results is recorded. These characteristics are confirmed through a number of proofs based on an abstract state machine formalization.