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.

System Layer

On the bottom system layer the TSI (Target System Interface) component is the interface between UNICORE and the individual resource management/batch system and operating system of the Grid resources.

TSI

In the TSI component the abstracted commands from the Grid are translated to system-specific commands, e.g. in the case of job submission, the specific commands like llsubmit or qsub of the local resource management system are called. The TSI component is performing the proper setting of the user ID and invocation of his/her environment.

If a UNICORE installation should be operated with multiple users, the TSI component is the only component of the UNICORE 6 stack that needs to be executed with root privileges. All other UNICORE 6 components at a site can be executed under a standard user account, preferably a dedicated, UNICORE-related account.

Note that the TSI component remained unchanged from UNICORE 5 to UNICORE 6. This has two major benefits. First, the TSI is available for a variety of commonly used batch systems such as Torque, LoadLeveler, LSF, SLURM, OpenCCS, etc. In addition a TSI version for the DRMAA standard is available enabling a standardized interface between the TSI and the batch system.

Second, the migration of a UNICORE site from UNICORE 5 to UNICORE 6 is easier, as already used and well-tested TSI components can be retained, so that the adaptation of the TSI to a specific Grid resource with its system configuration and environment must not be repeated.

USpace

The USpace is UNICOREs job directory. A separate directory exists for every job, where the XNJS and TSI stores all input data and where stdout and stderr are written to. For a site-to-site transfer and in particular for data transfer from/to external storages the GridFTP transfer protocol can be used.

External Storage

For a transfer of data from and to external storage, the GridFTP transfer protocol can be used.