Ralf Ratering’s research while affiliated with Intel and other places

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.

Large-scale scientific research often relies on the collaborative use of Grid and e-Science infrastructures that provide computational or storage related resources. One of the ideas of these modern infrastructures is to facilitate the routine interaction of scientists and their workflows with advanced problem solving tools and computational resources. While many production Grid projects and e-Science infrastructures have begun to offer services for the usage of resources to end-users during the past several years, the corresponding emerging standards defined by GGF and OASIS still appear to be in flux. In this paper, we present the GridBean technology that bridges the gap between the constantly changing basic Grid or e-Science infrastructures and the need of stable application development environments for the Grid users.

The service-oriented model of the grid offers a wide range of computational capability that can be shared over the Internet. In this paper we describe a concept to create and configure execution environments that can be dynamically deployed using virtual machines onto bare hardware. This new paradigm allows more flexible usage of available hardware and is expected to decrease the efforts needed to configure and maintain nodes on a grid. A novel aspect of the architecture is the use of Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) [4] and other emerging standards in the grid ecosystem. Based on these standards a prototype has been implemented that is used to create first results, and figure out challenges and future work following this new approach.