1. In a distributed environment having a plurality of computational engines, a method of transferring data from a first of the computational engines to a second of the computational engines, the method comprising: providing an interface associated with a data repository, the interface being configured to monitor and manage transfer of data involving the data repository, the first of the computational engines and the second of the computational engines; instructing the interface to transfer to the second of the computational engines data associated with a task distributed from the first of the computational engines; sending a request to the data repository, the request used to retrieve the data associated with the task; and transferring the data from the interface to the second of the computational engines when the data repository returns the requested data, the data transferred in a format that can be used by the second of the computational engines.