Makeflow: A Portable Abstraction for Data Intensive Computing on Clusters, Clouds, and Grids

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in languages and systems for large scale distributed computing. Unfortunately, most systems available to the end user use a custom description language tightly coupled to a specific runtime implementation, making it difficult to transfer applications between systems. To address this problem the authors introduce Makeflow, a simple system for expressing and running a data-intensive workflow across multiple execution engines without requiring changes to the application or workflow description. Makeflow allows any user familiar with basic Unix Make syntax to generate a workflow and run it on one of many supported execution systems.