Motivation

How can we trust the integrity of results from research that relies on computations without repeating them?

Research communities across the sciences face a conundrum: to ensure the transparency and reproducibility of computational results, they require that authors share the data, code, and methods used to obtain them. However, without verification by repeating the computations, there is no guarantee that the author-provided artifacts are complete or can actually be used to reproduced results.

Particularly problematic are studies that employ sensitive or proprietary data for which access and reuse are restricted; streaming, transient, or ephemeral data that cannot be used to verify reproducibility due to their dynamic nature; or very large-scale or specialized computational resources available only to authorized users. In these cases, verification by repeating computations may not be possible.

TRACE presents a solution to this problem: certify the successful original execution of the computational workflow that produced the reported findings in situ. We call this certified transparency—a trustworthy record of computations signed by the systems within which they were performed.