The present invention is directed towards systems and methods for decomposing a complex problem or task into one or more constituent components, operating in parallel over a plurality of computing devices in communication over a network. A system according to the present invention comprises one or more pipelets. A given pipelet comprises a read data interface operative to receive incoming data, one or more functions for processing the incoming data, and a write data interface operative to make the processed incoming data available as output data to be further processed. The system according to the present embodiment further comprises a controller operative to receive a pipeline specification that identifies the one or more pipelets as belonging to a pipeline, generate a dependency map that identifies an order in which to execute the one or more pipelets and execute the pipelets according to the dependency map to generate a result.