Roger S. Barga (Technical Computing Group, Microsoft Research Trident)
Science is undergoing a sea change. Instead of the small, private, periodic data sets currently being used in most sciences, large sophisticated remote sensor systems will soon bring enormous amounts of real-time data to be shared by multidisciplinary scientists. To deal with this shift from data poor to data rich science, new interfaces and tools need to be designed and built to help scientists effectively work with these systems and with the enormous amount of data that they will generate.
The Technical Computing Group at Microsoft Research is working closely with oceanographic and earth scientists in the Puget Sound and Monterey Bay regions to build these tools and interfaces. These are scientists that are already in the process of moving to data rich science. They currently have sensors and cameras that have collected large data sets and are adding more daily. The culmination of their work will be the NEPTUNE Regional Cabled Observatory (RCO), where eventually hundreds of miles of cable will provide power and bandwidth to thousands of instruments streaming back real-time data from the ocean floor.
In this talk I will describe Trident, which is a scientific workflow workbench for Oceanography. The goals of Trident include allowing the users to automate, explore and visual data; compose, run and catalog experiments; invoke event driven workflows that process streaming data; provide a workflow starter kit that easily allows users to extend functionality, and learn by exploring and visualizing ocean and model data.