Uniform Interface to Computing Resources (UNICORE)

UNICORE (Uniform Interface to Computing Resources) offers a ready-to-run Grid system including client and server software.
UNICORE makes distributed computing and data resources available in a seamless and secure way in intranets and the internet.

UNICORE has special characteristics that make it unique among Grid middleware systems. The UNICORE design is based on several guiding principles, that serve as key objectives for further enhancements.

Open source under BSD license.

Standards-based, conforming to the latest standards from the Open Grid Forum (OGF), W3C, OASIS, and IETF, in particular the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and the Web Services Resource Framework (WS-RF 1.2).

Open and extensible realized with a modern Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows to easily replace particular components with others.

Interoperable with other Grid technologies to enable a coupling of Grid infrastructures or the users needs

Seamless, secure, and intuitive following a vertical, end-to-end approach and offering components at all levels of a modern Grid architecture from intuitive user interfaces down to the resource level. Like previous versions UNICORE 6 seamlessly integrates in existing environments.

Mature security mechanisms adequate for the use in supercomputing environments and Grid infrastructures. X.509 certificates form the basis for authentication and authorisation, enhanced with a support for proxy certificates and virtual organisations (VO) based access control.

Workflow support tightly integrated into the stack while being extensible in order to use different workflow languages and engines for domain-specific usage.

Application integration mechanisms on the client, services and resource level for a tight integration of various types of applications from the scientific and industrial domain.

Different clients serving the needs of various scientific communities, e.g. graphical clients to define complex workflows, command line tool, webbased access.

Quick and simple to install and configure to address requirements from operational teams and to lower the barrier of adopting Grid technologies. Similar the configuration of the various services and components is easy to handle.

Various operating and batch systems are supported on all layers, i.e. clients, services and systems; Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Unix systems as well as different batch systems are supported such as LoadLeveler, Torque, SLURM, LSF, OpenCCS, etc.

Implemented in Java to achieve platform independence.