Microsoft Research Those of you that attended our Winter Roadshow might recall we did a rapid fire lunch time session covering a number of projects kicking around in the labs at Microsoft Research.

Earlier this month Chris announced that Kodu (which was then called Boku), a friendly game programming environment, was available on XBOX Live Marketplace.  Now, just this week at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, two other projects we covered in the Roadshow were also made available for download.

  • Project Trident, a scientific workflow workbench is available as a Customer Technology Preview.  If you recall, it’s a set of tools leveraging Windows Workflow and Silverlight/WPF to help scientists analyze extremely large data sets (such as those produced by the sea floor sensors deployed as part of Project NEPTUNE). 

  • Dryad, available as an academic release, is a distributed computing engine that enables the massive parallelization of applications across a cluster of Windows HPC Server 2008 machines.  It’s designed to solve problems similar to those targeted by Google’s MapReduce, but provides an abstraction via DyradLINQ that makes writing programs for Dryad not much different than the ones you’re writing now.

Matthew Podwysocki has a great post offering more insight into these two releases.

It’s cool to see this stuff come out of the lab into the light of day, and to think you heard it from us first!