Real-time computing. Real-time news.
August 27, 2007
UNICORE 6 Middleware Allows Extensible SOA
JUELICH, Germany, Aug. 23 -- In
science and industry today, computing and data resources are often
widely distributed across different systems, sites or even countries.
To make effective use of such a distributed infrastructure, end users
rely on tools that provide easy and uniform access. The new release of
UNICORE, the well-established European grid middleware, provides a
modern, lean software stack that implements an extensible
service-oriented architecture compliant to current Web services
standards. UNICORE 6 will be officially released next week at the
UNICORE Summit 2007 in Rennes, France.
With recent fast-paced
advances in grid and Web services standards and tools, the UNICORE
developer community under the leadership of Forschungszentrum Juelich
has developed a major new version of the UNICORE Grid middleware.
UNICORE 6 excels in supporting leading open standards, interoperability
and easy extensibility through well-defined interfaces, and it also
provides excellent performance and scalability. The proven guiding
principles of UNICORE have been preserved: seamless and secure access
to resources; ease of use; simple deployment; straightforward support
for adding new applications; and user-specific services.
UNICORE
6 achieves this through fully embracing service-oriented design
principles and using a modern tooling stack. The key characteristics of
the new UNICORE 6 system are an integrated, complete grid software
stack, strong security, workflows, openness, extensibility,
interoperability, easy installation and configuration, and support for
a wide range of operating systems, local resource management systems
and batch schedulers.
UNICORE 6 is being jointly developed by an
Intel Software and Solutions Group team in Bruehl; Fujitsu Laboratories
of Europe in London; the University of Warsaw - ICM; CINECA in Bologna;
and Forschungszentrum Juelich under an open source BSD licence.
On
the technical side, UNICORE 6 complies with the OASIS WSRF 1.2 and OGF
JSDL 1.0 standards, provides pluggable file transfer mechanisms with
the OGSA ByteIO standard as default and uses XFire as a lean,
high-performance SOAP stack in conjunction with the Jetty 6 Web server.
In the security domain, authentication and authorization are based on
full X.509 certificates, SAML assertions and XACML 1.0 authorisation
policies; pluggable extensions for proxy certificates and VO management
are provided.
The development versions of UNICORE 6 are already
in use in the European projects Chemomentum, OMII-Europe and A-WARE.
Major grid infrastructures like D-Grid and DEISA are expected to
upgrade their UNICORE production installations soon.
Over 10
years ago, the development of UNICORE was initiated in Germany with
funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The
German HPC centres and industry joined together to develop seamless,
secure, and intuitive access to supercomputing resources. Like the new
release, the initial software was implemented primarily in Java,
offered a feature-rich and intuitive graphical client, enabled users to
run complex multi-site workflow jobs, provided support for many
operating systems and batch systems, and used X.509 certificates for
authentication, authorisation, and signing of jobs. This software was
used by the German HPC centers to establish the first supercomputing
grid infrastructure in Europe. Since then, UNICORE has been further
improved and extended with additional functionality and features in
several European projects.
More information on UNICORE 6 can be found at www.unicore.eu.
Information on UNICORE SUMMIT 2007 can be found at www.unicore.eu/summit/2007/.
-----
Source: Forschungszentrum Juelich
