The scientific computing environment for experimental physics is comprised of a data analysis facility and its accompanying mass storage system. Details on the hardware are in the Scientific Computing Resources book.

The data analysis environment includes the batch "farm" (a compute cluster) plus its associated interactive nodes and disk storage systems.  Multiple files systems are accessible from both the interactive and batch nodes, and some of these are also accessible from desktops onsite.

SWIF1 and SWIF2 have essentially the same command line interface. However, SWIF2 has different status information output from what SWIF1 produces status output. For example, in SWIF2, swif status adds several fields, such as finer details about status of dispatched attempts, and removes a few such as individual error type counts. The status output can be in the following formats: simple text format, XML, and JSON.