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Concept
Cuneiform (programming language)
Summary
Cuneiform is an open-source workflow language
for large-scale scientific data analysis.
It is a statically typed functional programming language promoting parallel computing. It features a versatile foreign function interface allowing users to integrate software from many external programming languages. At the organizational level Cuneiform provides facilities like conditional branching and general recursion making it Turing-complete. In this, Cuneiform is the attempt to close the gap between scientific workflow systems like Taverna, KNIME, or Galaxy and large-scale data analysis programming models like MapReduce or Pig Latin while offering the generality of a functional programming language.
Cuneiform is implemented in distributed Erlang. If run in distributed mode it drives a POSIX-compliant distributed file system like Gluster or Ceph (or a integration of some other file system, e.g., HDFS). Alternatively, Cuneiform scripts can be executed on top of HTCondor or Hadoop.
Cuneiform is influenced by the work of Peter Kelly who proposes functional programming as a model for scientific workflow execution.
In this, Cuneiform is distinct from related workflow languages based on dataflow programming like Swift.
External tools and libraries (e.g., R or Python libraries) are integrated via a foreign function interface. In this it resembles, e.g., KNIME which allows the use of external software through snippet nodes, or Taverna which offers BeanShell services for integrating Java software. By defining a task in a foreign language it is possible to use the API of an external tool or library. This way, tools can be integrated directly without the need of writing a wrapper or reimplementing the tool.
Currently supported foreign programming languages are:
Bash
Elixir
Erlang
Java
JavaScript
MATLAB
GNU Octave
Perl
Python
R
Racket
Foreign language support for AWK and gnuplot are planned additions.
Cuneiform provides a simple, statically checked type system.
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