Scientific Computing with UNICORE
Dirk Breuer, Volker Sander, Mathilde Romberg, Dietmar W. Erwin, Roger Menday, Bernd Schuller, Philipp Wieder, Daniel Mallmann · JuSER (Forschungszentrum Jülich) · 2003
Long before the term Grid Computing was coined by Foster and Kesselman1 the develop- ment of UNICORE, a system offering a Uniform Interface to Computing Resources, was started. The goal was to provide users of the German supercomputer centers with a seam- less, secure, and intuitive access to the heterogeneous computing resources at the centers consistent with the recommendations of the German Science Council2. A first prototype was developed in project UNICORE3 to demonstrate the concept. The current production version was created in a follow-on project UNICORE Plus4 which was completed in 2002. UNICORE’s scope is expanded in projects like EUROGRID5, GRIP6 and OpenMolGRID7 to provide support for additional application areas and functions like resource brokering. Section 2 familiarises the term Grid and illustrates its major ideas and concepts. UNI- CORE as a realization of these ideas is introduced in Section 3 followed by a detailed description of the benefits UNICORE offers to users and application developers. Section 5 summarizes the paper and concludes with an outlook.