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Swift is a system for the rapid and reliable specification, execution, and management of large-scale science and engineering workflows. It supports applications that execute many tasks coupled by disk-resident datasets - as is common, for example, when analyzing large quantities of data or performing parameter studies or ensemble simulations.

A simple scripting language to enable the concise, high-level specifications of complex parallel computations, and mappers for accessing diverse data formats in a convenient manner.
An execution engine that can manage the dispatch of many (10,000) tasks to many (100) processors, whether on parallel computers, campus grids, or multi-site grids.

Swift users span the physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities, computer science, and education. Swift users have achieved multiple-order-of-magnitude savings in program development and execution time.

Swift builds on and includes technology previously distributed as the GriPhyN Virtual Data System.

"Swift applied to computational neuroscience. On the left, a small workflow from functional MRI study in aphasia; on the right, a map of brain activation clusters caused by various stimuli."

What's New?

SWIFT 0.4 RELEASE - 18 MAR 2008

The latest release of Swift, v0.4, is available from the downloads page.

You need to run an analysis pipeline on a thousand functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) files. The files are in some funny directory structure, the TeraGrid is miles away, and neither writing an MPI program nor performing the many analysis tasks manually is attractive. Swift addresses such challenges. A few lines of SwiftScript describe how your analysis procedures should be applied to the many fMRI images. Swift tools dispatch the thousands of tasks to TeraGrid nodes. Your computation is performed quickly and reliably, and the results are documented with data about how they were computed. Life is good.