Development

This section lists topics which are subject of development activities in the UNICORE community. These activities are often carried out by projects, but also by small groups or individuals. We are successively adding new topics and activities, and latest development topics are discussed on our mailing lists. In case you do UNICORE-related work and think that your development should be listed here, please contact unicore-web@unicore.eu.

DESHL - SAGA-based access to UNICORE Grids

The DESHL (DEISA Services for the Heterogeneous management Layer) provides users and their applications with a command line tool and application programming interfaces for job and data management in a UNICORE-based grid such as the DEISA heterogeneous supercomputing infrastructure. The DESHL employs emerging Grid standards like SAGA (Simple API for Grid Applications) and JSDL (Job Submission Description Language) as well as the Open Group Batch Environment Services specifications. More information is provided here.

Common Information Service - CIS

Grid Resource monitoring plays a pivotal role in resource brokering and in sophisticated service orchestration. CIS bridges this gap by providing detailed view of UNICORE Sites via a command line or and a web interface. Further details are available here.

Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Processing Service

The 52° North WPS-G project is developing a grid-enabled version of the OGC Web Processing Service based on UNICORE 6. Detailed information can be found here.

Virtual Services

The Virtual Services is a toolkit that enables the deploymenet of computational clusters composed of virtual machines (virtual clusters). The system in integrated into the UNICORE 6 middleware, which allows to interact with virtual clusters directly from UNICORE 6 clients. More details are provided here.

OGSA-BES & HPC-BP Adoption

Besides the native job submission interface, UNICORE also offers JSDL-compliant job submissions via the OGSA-BES OGF standard that in turn conforms to the OGF standard HPC-BP. More Information can be found here.

AMBER GridBean

The AMBER GridBean can be used as a plug-in for the Eclipse-based UNICORE 6 Rich Client in order to seamlessly work with the scientific molecular dynamics package AMBER. Details are available here.

OGSA-DAI Support

UNICORE can be seamlessly used to access any kind of data accessible via the OGSA-DAI technology. More information can be found here

Gaussian GridBean for the Application Client

The Paderborn Centre for Parallel Computing, University of Paderborn, Germany, is developing a Gaussian Interface GridBean to support Gaussian03 in UNICORE environments. Details (documentation and software) about the Gaussian GridBean are available here.

Grid API

The high-level API (HiLA) is a library for UNICORE which can be used to write clients / higher-level services for UNICORE 6 with programmer-friendly, concise code. Based on a single interface with multiple providers, a implementation of HiLA for UNICORE 5 is also available. Details are provided here.

Monitoring/Managability

A UNICORE Grid is composed of many services deployed on various machines. To monitor service health and manage the infrastructure, new tools and approaches will be needed.

Virtual Organisation Management

The OMII-Europe project has worked with the Chemomentum Project and IVOM project on solutions for UNICORE 6. Within the Chemomentum project, the UVOS component has been developed that provides VO management for UNICORE 6. Is is available for download from the UNICORE download area.

X.509 Proxy Support

In the past, UNICORE 6 only accepted full X.509 certificates. More recently, UNICORE 6 also works with X.509 proxy certificates to enable interoperability with Grid systems that are based on the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI). More Information can be found here.

Scheduling

Although UNICORE provides all the means for users to design and execute their workflows, there are usage scenarios where scheduling in an automatic manner is required. Therefore the UNICORE community is developing solutions for scheduling, for example to co-allocate resources for MPI jobs, to reserve resource in advance, et cetera.

The following developments are related to scheduling:

The MetaScheduling Service