UNICORE Summit 2016

Scope and main topics

The UNICORE Summit is the annual meeting of the UNICORE community. It provides a unique opportunity for UNICORE users, developers, administrators, researchers, service providers, and managers to meet.

Participate to share your experience, present recent and planned developments, learn about the latest UNICORE features, and get new ideas for interesting and prosperous collaborations.

The areas of interest of the UNICORE Summit 2016 were:

  • applications and workflows
  • high-performance computing and big data processing
  • security, identity management, federations
  • portals, science gateways, interoperability
  • cloud and virtualization techniques
  • operations and deployment of UNICORE
  • recent and planned development work
  • new ideas and concepts

Schedule and presentation slides

Thursday, June 23, 2016
11:10 - 11:40Björn Hagemeier (FZ Jülich) et.al.
Computational Steering revisited
Presentation
11:40 - 12:10Nico Hoffmann (TU Dresden) et.al.
Unified Cluster Execution Framework for KNIME Workflows
Presentation
12:10 - 12:40Richard Grunzke (TU Dresden) et.al.
KNIME HPC INTEGRATION VIA UNICORE
Presentation
14:00 - 14:30 Krzysztof Benedyczak (ICM Warsaw)
Towards Unity 2.0
Presentation
14:30 - 15:00 Maria Petrova-El Sayed (FZ Jülich) et.al.
Recent developments in the UNICORE Portal
Presentation
15:00 - 15:30 Bernd Schuller (FZ Jülich)
Reliability, load-balancing, monitoring and all that: deployment aspects of UNICORE
Presentation

Workshop report

The twelfth UNICORE Summit took place in Frankfurt on the day after the International Supercomputing 2016. Twelve people gathered to present their latest work and discuss a variety of topics related to UNICORE.

Two presentations from Richard Grunzke and Nico Hoffmann (both TU Dresden) showed how UNICORE can be used in order to add HPC capabilities to the KNIME data analytics toolkit, which is widely used in many communities. Björn Hagemeier (FZ Jülich) presented new developments on adding interactive access to running HPC jobs, for realising use cases such as visualisation or computational steering.

Krzysztof Benedyzcak (ICM) presented his recent work on Unity. Unity is used for identity management very successfully in many projects including HBP, EGI, EUDAT and more. The plans for Unity 2.0 include numerous new features in addition to major internal improvements of the software. Maria Petrova-El Sayed (FZ Jülich) presented recent enhancements of the UNICORE Portal. A simple way to launch parametrized workflows based on workflow templates was added. The second major new feature is data-sharing, which enables Portal users to easily share data with other users.

Bernd Schuller (FZ Jülich) presented his work on low-level development issues related to high-availability deployment and horizontal scaling of UNICORE. It is now possible to run multiple UNICORE servers in a cluster.
In the discussions, several topics stood out. Container solutions (notably Docker) are of high interest to both users and administrators of HPC systems. Simplifying UNICORE installation and configuration is an ongoing process. It was proposed to add support for heterogeneous clusters, as well as adding automatic determination of the cluster’s logical layout, i.e. the configured queues and their capabilities. The new data-sharing in the UNICORE Portal generated a lot of interest, especially integration with Unity to improve the user experience.

© Forschungszentrum Jülich 2024, Foto: republica (CC BY 2.0)