Swift

Ian Foster points today to the unveiling of Swift:

We unveiled this week the first release of Swift, a system for the specification, execution, and management of applications comprising many tasks coupled by disk-resident datasets. Such applications are common when analyzing large quantities of data, performing parameter studies, and/or executing ensemble simulations.

The open source software includes a scripting language for tying everything together and an execution engine to get the work done.

Swift users in the physical, biological, and social sciences; the humanities; computer science; and education have achieved multiple-order-of-magnitude savings (!) in program development and execution time, relative to approaches based on shell scripts and other ad hoc technologies.