Outercurve Foundation Announces Creation of Research Accelerators Gallery and Acceptance of the Scientific Workflow Workbench as Anchor Project

WAKEFIELD, Mass., Oct. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- The Outercurve Foundation today announced the creation of the Research Accelerators Gallery, the organization's third gallery and the first established to meet an industry need, rather than address a specific technology. The gallery's sponsor is Microsoft Research, a group of more than 800 researchers and scientists dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering within Microsoft Corporation.

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The Scientific Workflow Workbench (code named Project Trident), built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, has been accepted as the gallery's anchor project. Project Trident provides scientists with graphical tools for creating, running, managing and sharing workflows for analyzing large, diverse datasets. The workbench includes provenance services, optional integration with Windows HPC Server 2008, and the ability to publish and reuse workflows from MyExperiment.org. Developers can extend the Scientific Workflow Workbench by implementing custom components to handle specialized processing requirements for data collection, data analysis, and data visualization. The workbench is available under the Apache 2.0 open source license and was contributed to the foundation by Microsoft Research.

"We are thrilled to announce the Research Accelerators Gallery, the first gallery created to address industry-specific challenges," said Paula Hunter, Executive Director, the Outercurve Foundation. "The Outercurve Foundation's goal with this gallery is to encourage the collection of a well-rounded mix of open source projects that enhance the research experience."  

Derick Campbell, Director of Engineering, Microsoft Research, is the Research Accelerators Gallery manager. The Scientific Workflow Workbench was contributed by project committers Dean Guo, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Research, Professor Beth Plale of Indiana University and Susan Cuddy, a researcher with Australia's CSIRO Land and Water research division. Professor Plale, a researcher in Indiana University's Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery II (LEAD II) research project, used Project Trident to provide workflows to support the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Vortex2 project to gather data on tornadoes. The water information R&D alliance between the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO's Water for a Healthy Country Flagship program is using Project Trident as the platform for its Hydrologists Workbench, a suite of tools and workflows for hydrological modelers.

"Microsoft Research is interested in empowering computer and research scientists to do great work through software," said Campbell. "We hope that establishing the Research Accelerators Gallery with the Outercurve Foundation and by contributing Project Trident we will have opportunities to engage with new contributors and new open source collaborations."  

For more information on the Outercurve Foundation, visit www.outercurve.org. For information on the Research Accelerators Gallery, visit http://www.outercurve.org/Galleries/ResearchAccelerators. For information on Project Trident, visit http://research.microsoft.com/trident.  

About The Outercurve Foundation

The Outercurve Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. For more information about the Outercurve Foundation contact [email protected].

SOURCE The Outercurve Foundation