1. A system for processing one or more sets of data, the system comprising: one or more pipelets, a given pipelet comprising 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; and 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.