UNICORE represents a vertically integrated solution focusing on uniform access to distributed computing resources. It was developed by a consortium of German universities, research laboratories and companies. It has benefited from development efforts provided by several European projects. The UNICORE service is running in production for example in DEISA Grid.
Unicore is a Java based grid environment consisting of three main components: UNICORE Client and a UNICORE site/Gateway which may have multiple virtual sites (connections to local resources).
Besides the UNICORE WS-RF port in the UnicoreGrids (see UNICORE6) project extensions or enhancements for UNICORE are developed today by:
OMIIEurope (http:www.omii-europe.org), A-Ware (http:www.aware-project.org) and Chemomentum (http:www.chemmomentum.org)
Forschungszentrum Jülich, ZAM
Available from Sourceforge
or www.unicore.eu/download/unicore5
BSD
In production at many site infrastructures, for example Deisa Grid or D-Grid.
Authentication is based on X.509 certificates for the user and for jobs. An explicit trust delegation model is implemented.
TLS/SSL is used for communication
Not supported
UNICORE provides data staging to transfer files from and to a client.
Gridftp is also possible by a Unicore/Globus Interface.There is no data management in sense of an abstraction layer.
UNICORE provides an easy to use client (GUI) with features for job monitoring and user certificate management.
The client application plugin and the workflow editor gives users the possibility to built their own application dependent interface used by a variety of user communities like Bioinformatics, Chemistry, Automotive, etc. in different national and European projects.