INDUSTRY

By Uwe Harms, Harms Supercomputing Consulting -- The German Supercomputer Centres initiated and created the grid infrastructure UNICORE (Uniform Interfaces to Computing Resources) to allow an easy-to-use, secure and browser-based access to the high-end machines from everywhere. The project started as early as 1997. In the meantime the development reached a production stage. Thus the UNICORE Forum decided to announce an open source license of the UNICORE Software for research purposes. This grid system allows the researcher to start jobs from their clients everywhere without knowing the job control language as well as the file system and the compiler parameters of the target computer. In the next step the UNICORE developers work on portals for specific application packages like computational chemistry and computer aided engineering and simulation. The UNICORE development was funded by the German Ministry of Research (BMBF). The software is used in different computer centres. Additionally it is the base in several European projects like EUROGRID. In a specific project, GRIP, the interoperability of UNICORE and the US-based grid-system Globus, and the compatibility with the new grid standard OGSA will be realized. Thus it will be possible to start jobs in UNICORE which will be processed on Globus sites and vice-versa. The UNICORE Forum In the beginning of 2000 users and developers founded the UNICORE Forum as an autonomous, open and a non-profit organization, which pushes and supports the development, distribution and the use of UNICORE. It is independent of the BMBF funded UNICORE and UNICORE Plus projects. It publishes the external interfaces for UNICORE and will update UNICORE specifications as future developments require. Additionally the Forum controls the specifications and the application programming interfaces of the UNICORE system and guarantees the very important independence. It will provide support in certifying that implementations comply with the latest UNICORE standards. The participation is open for grid developers, grid users, hard- and software vendors. Actually it has 25 members, including all the vendors interested and involved in grid technology. Additionally international computer centres in academia and research are members of the Forum. UNICORE Forum offers sources of UNICORE software The availability of the first production of UNICORE inspired the Forum in its last session in April. It decided to make the software available for all interested partners for research purposes. The base is an community source license model. It can be downloaded from Http://www.unicore.org. For production environments Pallas GmbH, Brühl, Germany, offers a commercial UNICORE version. It can be used in industrial environments like Intranet solution or as a technology for the Application Service Provider model. UNICORE Test Site People, not involved in the project, can use and check a UNICORE test system. It includes the current client and a set of target sites to send jobs to. The Central Institute for Applied Mathematics (ZAM) of the Research Centre Jüelich installed a dedicated test grid for functionally testing. The installation and initialization as well as the 30 day usage restriction are described on the web site. The Test Grid simulates their UNICORE Sites with up to two target systems. An access to real supercomputers is not possible. Thus interested users can check the user interface and the functionality even if they are not involved in the project. User Experiences Professor Geerd-Rüdiger Hoffmann, Head of the Department Systems and Operations at the German Weather Services (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) and chairman of Unicore Forum introduces UNICORE at DWD. „In the near future we allow and control the access to our machines and supercomputer by UNICORE. The networked computer capacity incorporates a huge saving potential and will improve the efficiency for all participating partners. Thus we realize an DWD grid computing." The hardware vendors are extremely interested in the project and support it heavily. “UNICORE realized since 1997 networked computing - long before the Grid term was used", mentioned Dr. Ulla Thiel, Director Scientific and Technical Computing, IBM EMEA, representing the view of the hardware vendors.