Roger Menday

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.

Key aspects of the UNICORE 6 security model

This paper presents the security architecture of the sixth version of the UNICORE grid middleware. The sixth iteration of UNICORE introduced a number of new, security-related solutions which make UNICORE distinguishable from the other grid middleware as Globus, gLite or NorduGrid ARC, and these are presented in this paper. The paper discusses the low level security: users authentication, non-repudiation control and trust delegation. The UNICORE unique approach to the challenge of trust delegation is called explicit trust delegation (ETD); discussion of this constitutes the most significant and extensive part of this paper. ETD is compared with the popular grid security infrastructure (GSI). High level security services (such as authorization services) are not described in this paper.

Web Services Interfaces and Open Standards Integration into the European UNICORE 6 Grid Middleware

The UNICORE grid system provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed grid resources. In recent years, UNICORE 5 is used as a well-tested grid middleware system in production grids (e.g. DEISA, D-Grid) and at many supercomputer centers world-wide. Beyond this production usage, UNICORE serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects and business scenarios from T-Systems, Philips Research, Intel, Fujitsu and others. To foster ongoing developments in multiple projects, UNICORE is open source under BSD license at SourceForge. More recently, the new Web services-based UNICORE 6 has become available that is based on open standards such as the Web services addressing (WS-A) and the Web services resource framework (WS-RF) and thus conforms to the open grid services architecture (OGSA) of the open grid forum (OGF). In this paper we present the evolution from production UNICORE 5 to the open standards-based UNICORE 6 and its various Web services-based interfaces. It describes the interface integration of emerging open standards such as OGSA-BES and OGSA-RUS and thus provides an overview of UNICORE 6.

A versatile execution management system for next-generation UNICORE grids

This paper builds on extensive experience with the UNICORE middleware to derive requirements for the next generation of Grid execution management systems. We present some well-known architectural ideas and design principles that allow building Grid servers that are adaptable to any type of target systems, from single workstations or PCs to huge supercomputers, and flexible enough for the novel usage scenarios and business models that are coming up in next-generation Grid systems. These ideas are used to implement an execution management system similar in scope to the UNICORE NJS.

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.

A DRMAA-based target system interface framework for UNICORE

The UNICORE grid technology provides a seamless, secure, and intuitive access to distributed grid resources. UNICORE is a full-grown and well-tested grid middleware system that is used in daily production and research projects worldwide. The success of the UNICORE technology can at least partially be explained by the fact that UNICORE consists of a three-tier architecture. In this paper, we present the evolution of one of its tiers that is mainly used for job and resource management. This evolution integrates the distributed resource management application API (DRMAA) of the Global Grid Forum providing UNICORE with a standardized interface to underlying resource management systems and other grid systems

A business-oriented grid workflow management system

The wide adoption of Service Oriented Architecture by the Grid community has made available several software tools that allow exposing hardware resources and scientific data to remote peers by means of well standardized protocols. Hence the necessity for scientists to easily design a simulation that leverages distributed applications. In this paper, we present the implementation details of A-WARE, a workflow framework that adopts recognised standards, especially by the enterprise community, like BPEL. In this way our product can boast a higher level of interoperability with other similar systems. The workflow graphical notation is also based on a standard: BPMN. BPMN provides a unique, standardized and comprehensive modeling format understandable by both business people (involved in the area of business process management) and IT people, resulting also portable across different departments or companies.

Applying Semantic Technologies to Public Sector: A Case Study in Fraud Detection

Fraudulent claims cost both the public and private sectors an enormous amount of money each year. The existence of data silos is considered one of the main barriers to cross-region, cross-department, and cross-domain data analysis that can detect abnormalities not easily seen when focusing on single data sources. An evident advantage of leveraging Linked Data and semantic technologies is the smooth integration of distributed data sets. This paper reports a proof-of-concept study in the benefit fraud detection area. We believe that the design considerations, study outcomes, and learnt lessons can help making decisions of how one should adopt semantic technologies in similar contexts.

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.

A one-stop, fire-and-(almost)forget, dropping-off and rendezvous point

In order to foster uptake by scientific and business users we need an easy way to access Grid resources. This is the motivation for the A-WARE project. We build upon a fabric layer of Grid and other resources, by providing a higher-layer service for managing the interaction with these resources - A One-Stop, Fire-and-(almost)Forget, Dropping-off and Rendezvous Point. Work assignments can be formulated using domain specific dialects, allowing users to express themselves in their domain of expertise. Both Web service and REST bindings are provided, as well as allowing the component to be embedded into other presentation technologies (such as portals). In addition common desktop notification mechanisms such as Email, RSS/Atom feeds and instant messaging keep users informed and in control. We propose using the Java Business Integration specification as the framework for building such a higher-level component, delivering unprecedented opportunities for the integration of Grid technologies with the enterprise computing infrastructures commonly found in businesses.