Many important scientific questions require large-scale projects that involve multiple disciplines. For example, the following figure shows the Neptune project—a large scale multidisciplinary integrated study of the northeastern Pacific that addresses some important issues in Oceanography and Marine Geology.

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench is a set of tools—based on the Windows Workflow Foundation—for creating and running data analysis workflows. It addresses scientists’ need for a flexible and powerful way to analyze large and diverse datasets, and share their results.

• Trident Composer provides graphical tools for creating workflows.
• Trident Management Studio provides graphical tools for running, managing, and sharing workflows.  It manages the Trident Registry, schedules workflow jobs, and monitors local or remote workflow execution.
• For large data sets, Trident can run multiple workflows in parallel on a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster.
• Trident Workflow Application—available in Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight versions—provides a simple way to run Trident workflows.  The Microsoft Silverlight version allows users to run workflows remotely using a Silverlight-enabled browser, which are available for a variety of operating systems.
•  Trident provides a framework to add runtime services and comes with services such as provenance and workflow monitoring.
• The Word Add-in for Reproducible Research allows Scientists document their data analysis and share Trident workflows with colleagues by embedding workflows in a Microsoft Word 2007 document.  Scientists can reproduce the analysis by rerunning the embedded workflow.
• Trident is integrated with the myExperiment Web site (http://www.myexperiment.org) - a workflow collaboration portal—so scientists can easily share their Trident workflows with colleagues.
• The Trident security model supports users and roles that allows scientists to control access rights to their workflows.

Developers can extend Trident by implementing custom components to handle tasks such as specialized data processing procedures.

Trident requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and SQL Server Express, SQL Server 2005, or SQL Server 2008.

Please send your feedback and comments to: msrert@microsoft.com.  Thank you.