No abstract

Abstract. The UNICORE Grid-technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources. In this paper we present the recent evolution from project results to production Grids. At the beginning UNICORE was developed as a prototype software in two projects funded by the German research ministry (BMBF). Over the following years, in various European-funded projects, UNICORE evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects, which use existing UNICORE components to implement advanced features, high level services, and support for applications from a growing range of domains. In order to foster these ongoing developments, UNICORE is available as open source under BSD licence at SourceForge, where new releases are published on a regular basis. This paper is a review of the UNICORE achievements so far and gives a glimpse on the UNICORE roadmap.

UNICORE (Uniform Interface to Computer Resources) is a software infrastructure supporting seamless and secure access to distributed resources. UNICORE allows uniform access to different hardware and software platforms as well as different organizational environments. Based on the abstract job model it offers services for security, translation of abstract jobs into real batch jobs for different target systems, and a public key infrastructure. This paper describes the UNICORE architecture and the services provided.

Seamless access to different systems of different vendors at different sites is an important prerequisite to effective and efficient use of distributed resources. Learning about new systems, new software, and new interfaces is a timeconsuming task for users who actually want to run their applications. UNICORE is a project to overcome these difficulties by providing a uniform interface for job preparation and control which gives seamless and secure access to supercomputer resources. It is an ambitious project delivering a production ready prototype within two years. The presentation will focus on the UNICORE architecture, especially the protocol and the underlying security mechanisms.