Makeflow: make-inspired engine for large workflows on clusters, clouds, and grids

I didn't like make files when I used them in the past.

I get the cleverness of the solution but I don't like the cryptic syntax, something useful hiding behind something (no longer necessarily) complex.

Make is actually a pretty good system for setting up parallel computations, if you're doing it on one machine. Are parallel computations with lots of dependencies too simple of a problem? People get excited about things that are even simpler than that, like Map/Reduce, as long as you're doing them to enough data.

I'm not sure which part you're "not a fan" of -- there are some pretty awful, ugly things you can do with Makefiles, which includes basically everything about compiling C, but you don't have to do awful things, and the fundamental idea of "you need this to build this" is implemented very well by Make.

Now, I've recently been converted to using Ninja, in fact by someone on HN, when I asked if there was a Make-like system that understands steps with M inputs and N outputs. It keeps the same fundamental idea while discarding a lot of Make baggage. But if this Makeflow system said "it's like Ninja for clusters" instead of "it's like Make for clusters", nobody would know what they were talking about.