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Computation semantics of the functional scientific workflow language Cuneiform*

Part of: Big Data Special Collection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2017

JÖRGEN BRANDT ,
WOLFGANG REISIG  and
ULF LESER
JÖRGEN BRANDT
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany (e-mails: brandjoe@informatik.hu-berlin.de, reisig@informatik.hu-berlin.de, leser@informatik.hu-berlin.de)
WOLFGANG REISIG
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany (e-mails: brandjoe@informatik.hu-berlin.de, reisig@informatik.hu-berlin.de, leser@informatik.hu-berlin.de)
ULF LESER
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany (e-mails: brandjoe@informatik.hu-berlin.de, reisig@informatik.hu-berlin.de, leser@informatik.hu-berlin.de)
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Abstract

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Cuneiform is a minimal functional programming language for large-scale scientific data analysis. Implementing a strict black-box view on external operators and data, it allows the direct embedding of code in a variety of external languages like Python or R, provides data-parallel higher order operators for processing large partitioned data sets, allows conditionals and general recursion, and has a naturally parallelizable evaluation strategy suitable for multi-core servers and distributed execution environments like Hadoop, HTCondor, or distributed Erlang. Cuneiform has been applied in several data-intensive research areas including remote sensing, machine learning, and bioinformatics, all of which critically depend on the flexible assembly of pre-existing tools and libraries written in different languages into complex pipelines. This paper introduces the computation semantics for Cuneiform. It presents Cuneiform's abstract syntax, a simple type system, and the semantics of evaluation. Providing an unambiguous specification of the behavior of Cuneiform eases the implementation of interpreters which we showcase by providing a concise reference implementation in Erlang. The similarity of Cuneiform's syntax to the simply typed lambda calculus puts Cuneiform in perspective and allows a straightforward discussion of its design in the context of functional programming. Moreover, the simple type system allows the deduction of the language's safety up to black-box operators. Last, the formulation of the semantics also permits the verification of compilers to and from other workflow languages.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 27 , 2017 , e22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Footnotes

*

This work is funded by the EU FP7 project “Scalable, Secure Storage and Analysis of Biobank Data” under Grant Agreement no. 317871. We also acknowledge funding by the Humboldt Graduate School GRK 1651: SOAMED.

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