Michael Rambadt

Unicore — From project results to production grids

The UNICORE Grid-technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources. In this paper we present the recent evolution from project results to production Grids. At the beginning UNICORE was developed as a prototype software in two projects funded by the German research ministry (BMBF). Over the following years, in various European-funded projects, UNICORE evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects, which use existing UNICORE components to implement advanced features, high level services, and support for applications from a growing range of domains. In order to foster these ongoing developments, UNICORE is available as open source under BSD licence at Source Forge, where new releases are published on a regular basis. This paper is a review of the UNICORE achievements so far and gives a glimpse on the UNICORE roadmap.

UNICORE-Globus interoperability: getting the best of both worlds

Summary form only given. This work describes a software prototype developed at Research Center Julich to demonstrate the interoperability between UNICORE (Uniform Interface to Computer Resources) and Globus without changes to any of the systems. By combining UNICOREs workflow oriented approach to job submission with Globus, grid users can gain seamless access to a wide number of Globus enabled systems. We define the following scenario of a job submission from UNICORE to Globus: the user prepares the job via UNICOREs graphical user interface, chooses a Globus site where the job is to be computed and submits it to UNICOREs target system interface (TSI). This is the entity normally interfacing with the local batch system. It is enhanced to communicate with Globus. The TSI translates the job description from the UNICORE specific abstract job object (AJO) into the GRAM Resource Specification Language (RSL) and submits it to the GRAM Gatekeeper. Standard Globus mechanisms are used to monitor the status of the job and transfer the output back to the TSI.

Exploring the Potential of Using Multiple E-science Infrastructures with Emerging Open Standards-Based E-health Research Tools

E-health makes use of information and communication methods and the latest e-research tools to support the understanding of body functions. E-scientists in this field take already advantage of one single infrastructure to perform computationally-intensive investigations of the human body that tend to consider each of the constituent parts separately without taking into account the multiple important interactions between them. But these important interactions imply an increasing complexity of applications that embrace multiple physical models (i.e. multi-physics) and consider a larger range of scales (i.e. multi-scale) thus creating a steadily growing demand for interoperable infrastructures that allow for new innovative application types of jointly using different infrastructures for one application. But interoperable infrastructures are still not seamlessly provided and we argue that this is due to the absence of a realistically implementable infrastructure interoperability reference model that is based on lessons learned from e-science usage. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to explore the potential of using multiple infrastructures for one scientific goal with a particular focus on e-health. Since e-scientists gain more interest in using multiple infrastructures there is a clear demand for interoperability between them to enable a use with one e-research tool. The paper highlights work in the context of an e-Health blood flow application while the reference model is applicable to other e-science applications as well.

UNICORE deployment within the DEISA supercomputing grid infrastructure

DEISA is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centers that is building and operating a persistent distributed supercomputing environment with continental scope in Europe. To integrate their resources, the DEISA partners have adopted the most advanced middleware and applications currently available. The consortium decided to embrace UNICORE as a job submission interface for the DEISA grid infrastructure. UNICORE is the foremost European grid technology able to hide the complexity of the underlying resources providing a user-friendly graphical user interface for job submission. This paper presents the deployment solution and strategies implemented by DEISA in order to adapt UNICORE for their infrastructure.

Experiences with Using UNICORE in Production Grid Infrastructures DEISA and D-Grid

The early stages of Grid Computing focussed on developing concepts and prototype software. Grid middleware is now at a phase of some maturity and today the focus has shifted to providing production ready Grid environments for scientists. DEISA and D-Grid aim for this production scope. DEISA is the consortium of leading national European supercomputing centres that currently deploys and operates a persistent, production quality, and distributed supercomputing environment in Europe. D-Grid is the German Grid initiative that builds up and operates a sustainable Grid infrastructure and establishes methods of e-science in the German scientific community. UNICORE is used in DEISA and D-Grid as the interface to heterogeneous production resources, and hides the complexity of resources from users. UNICORE is one of the leading Grid middleware systems used in production Grid infrastructures worldwide. This paper describes the experiences with UNICORE as Grid middleware in e-infrastructures comprising production systems in production use.

Integration of GridFTP as an Alternative File Transfer in UNICORE for the DEISA Infrastructure

Many scientific applications produce a lot of data when running on large-scale supercomputers. Sometimes this data can stay on the local storages but often it should be transferred to other resources for post processing or to be used for new computations. Therefore it is essential to have efficient file transfer mechanisms that transfer data. Scientists increasingly use Grid middleware like UNICORE for their job creation, submission and management. In the Grid community there are not many efficient solutions for file transfer, but GridFTP does provide efficient file transfer and nowadays is a de facto Grid standard. This paper motivates and describes the integration of GridFTP into UNICORE which now is a very important feature for scientists using DEISA resources.