Another excellent podcast in which .NET Rocks! interviews Dean Gou about Project Trident. Project Trident was created for the real/near-time monitoring of thousands of oceanic sensors, in short it helps to crunch large quantities of data.
The boys talk to Dean Gou about Project Trident, a scientific workflow workbench. With Project Trident, you can author workflows visually by using a catalog of existing activities and complete workflows. The workflow workbench provides a tiered library that hides the complexity of different workflow activities and services for ease of use.
While the project sounds very interesting in its own right I have to wonder at what other possible applications there are for Project Trident.
Trident is part of a collaborative project between The University of Washington, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Microsoft, to provide Project NEPTUNE with a scientific workflow workbench for Oceanography. Trident, implemented on top of Windows Workflow Foundation, allows scientists to explore and visualize oceanographic data in real-time and provides an environment to visually compose, run and catalog workflows.
If Trident is used by oceanographic scientists then it should also be useful to educational researchers, while enhancing the fidelity of their work.
Other features in Trident for data-intensive research include: automatic provenance capture, “smart” re-running of different versions of a workflow, on-the-fly updatable parameters, cost estimation of the resources a workflow will require, monitoring of long-running tasks, and support for fault-tolerance and recovery from failures.

Fascinating stuff!
via .NET Rocks!.
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