We'll present Bifrost, a lightweight new framework designed to ease the development and deployment of pipeline applications that demand sustained peak utilization of network, CPU, and GPU resources under soft real-time constraints. Such applications are common in experimental science and computer vision, where processing must keep up with acquisition systems to avoid data loss. Bifrost enables operations to be wrapped in a simple task container with metadata-rich inputs and outputs. By connecting tasks together, complex branching pipelines can be constructed, with asynchronous communication handled by efficient ring buffers in host or device memory. We'll demonstrate Bifrost using a high-performance radio astronomy application that has been deployed as part of the LEDA project.