The UNICORE Forum e.V. was founded in December 1999 by developers, leading European HPC centres, and supporting hardware vendors as a non-profit association to foster the distribution and use of UNICORE, to publish and maintain the specifications, to coordinate further development, certify implementations and extensions, and to support workshops.

Objectives of the UNICORE Forum e.V.
Seamless access: The UNICORE Forum is an open, non-profit association which promotes the development and distribution of the UNICORE Grid system. Membership is open to users and developers of Grid software as well as to hardware vendors.
UNICORE - The Seamless Grid Solution: UNICORE makes seamless Grid computing a reality: its user-friendly interface allows easy and uniform access to distributed computing resources, and provides support for running important scientific and engineering applications. Scientists and engineers can harness the power of today's supercomputers without having to become experts in the access and security policies at different centers.
The UNICORE Forum: To foster the distribution and use of the UNICORE system, the developers, leading European HPC Centers and supporting hardware vendors have founded the UNICORE Forum as a non-profit association. The Forum promotes development, use, and distribution of UNICORE through the following activities:
Promote UNICORE: To promote the use of UNICORE in Grid application and development projects and amongst end-users, the UNICORE Forum organizes workshops, supports presentations at conferences, and provides a discussion forum for UNICORE users and developers.
Publish UNICORE specifications: The UNICORE Forum publishes and maintains the specifications of the UNICORE software layers and of the protocols between them.
Coordinate the further development of UNICORE: As the UNICORE system is used and further developed by an increasing number of Grid projects, new functional requirements emerge and extensions to the UNICORE specifications will be necessary. The UNICORE Forum will coordinate this process and will act as clearing house.
Certify UNICORE implementations and extensions: The UNICORE specifications are open and anyone is welcome to implement all or part of the UNICORE components, and to develop extensions to the reference implementation. The UNICORE Forum offers to certify the functionality of such implementations and extensions according to the published UNICORE specifications.