A Functional Workflow Language.
Cuneiform is a workflow specification language which makes it easy to integrate heterogeneous tools and libraries and exploit data parallelism. Users do not have to create heavy-weight wrappers for establised tools or to reimplement them. Instead, they apply their existing software to partitioned data. Using the Hi-WAY application master Cuneiform can be executed on Hadoop YARN which makes it suitable for large scale data analysis.
Cuneiform comes in the form of a functional programming language with a Foreign Function Interface (FFI) that lets users create functions in any suitable scripting language and apply these functions in a uniform way.
Data paralelism is expressed by applying map, cross-product, dot-product, or combinations of the aforementioned algorithmic skeletons to collections of black-box data.