A general purpose high-performance distributed execution engine can be used by developers to deploy large-scale distributed applications. To allow developers to easily make use of the distributed execution engine, a graph building language is proposed that enables developers to efficiently create graphs (e.g., direct acyclic graphs) that describe the subprograms to be executed and the flow of data between them. A job manager (or other appropriate entity) reads the description of the graph created with the graph building language, builds the graph based on that description, and intelligently distributes the subprograms according to the graph so that system resources are used efficiently. In one embodiment, the graph building language (and, thus, the description of the graph) includes syntax for replication, pointwise connect, cross connect and merge.