The UNICORE Forum e.V. is an organizational member of the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Forschungszentrum Jülich is a member of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

UNICORE is part of the European Middleware Initiative.

Plugin for Taverna

The UNICORE plugin for Taverna enables users to submit jobs from Taverna Workbench to a UNICORE resource.

The access to UNICORE resources from Taverna, is enabled by adding a UNICORE registry in Taverna’s Service Panel. This UNICORE registry is queried to receive a list of available applications from the UNICORE services orchestrator. The applications are selected from various UNICORE resources, with help of the IDB and applications metadata.

The list of applications is then used in Taverna to display available UNICORE services (applications), which can be added as services into Taverna workflows. The metadata is used to create input and output ports of the specific service. Users can than connect inputs/outputs to other workflow services in the usual manner.

During the worfklow execution, a job description is created and submitted to the UNICORE service orchestrator(SO). Files are being uploaded and the SO then manages the execution and file transmission. The status of the submitted job is polled in the background from Taverna. After the job finished, some files are downloaded, or for further modification, only the logical file name is retrieved.

Additionally, the UNICORE services are using Taverna’s Credential Manager to get access to the user’s X.509 certificate, which user has to load prior to service invocation, along with the other CA’s certificates. The UNICORE services then access the user’s certificate and use it for job submission (since UNICORE’s security concept is based upon grid security and X.509 certificates).

A snapshot of the plugin in Taverna is shown below.
Snapshot of Taverna Plug-in (high-resolution image)

Developer contacts:

Sonja Holl

Status:

The UNICORE plug-in for Taverna is available for download (November 2011).
Documentation is available as .html and .txt.