Juelich Supercomputing Center

In the last couple of years, many e-Science infrastructures have begun to offer production services to e-Scientists with an increasing number of applications that require access to different kinds of computational resources. Within Europe two rather different multi-national e-Science infrastructures evolved over time namely Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) and Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE). DEISA provides access to massively parallel systems such as supercomputers that are well suited for scientific applications that require many interactions between their typically high numbers of CPUs. EGEE on the other hand provides access to a world-wide Grid of university clusters and PC pools that are well suited for farming applications that require less or even no interactions between the distributed CPUs. While DEISA uses the HPC-driven Grid technology UNICORE, EGEE is based on the gLite Grid middleware optimized for farming jobs. Both have less adoption of open standards and therefore both systems are technically non-interoperable, which means that no e-Scientist can easily leverage the DEISA and EGEE infrastructure with one suitable client environment for scientific applications. This paper argues that future interoperability of such large e-Science infrastructures is required to improve e-Science in general and to increase the real scientific impact of world-wide Grids in particular. We discuss the interoperability achieved by the OMII-Europe project that fundamentally improved the interoperability between UNICORE and gLite by using open standards. We also outline one specific scientific scenario of the WISDOM initiative that actually benefits from the recently established interoperability.

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 OA-SIS 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 UNICORE Grid system has been developed since the late 1990s to support distributed computing applications and emerging Grid infrastructures. Over the years, UNICORE has evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide. Also, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects. In this paper, we present issues surrounding the integration of standards into the UNICORE Grid system. We summarize here the principal characteristics of the latest Web services-based Unicore/GS release, which provides significant enhancements in the areas of interoperability, standards compliance and functionality.

The UNICORE software provides a grid infrastructure together with a computing portal for engineers and scientists to access supercomputer centers from anywhere on the Internet. While UNICORE is primarily designed for the submission and control of batch jobs it is also feasible to establish an online connection between an application and the UNICORE user-client. This opens up the possibility of performing online-visualization and computational steering of applications under UNICORE control while maintaining the security provided by this system. This contribution describes the design of a steering extension to UNICORE based on the steering toolkit VISIT. VISIT is a light-weight library that supports bi-directional data exchange between visualizations and parallel applications. As an example application, a parallel simulation of a laser-plasma interaction that can be steered by an AVS/Express application, is presented.

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 SourceForge, 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.

ABSTRACT Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed environment stretches across administrative domains. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. A first implementation has been realised for dynamic Grid environments in the European SmartLM project co-funded by the European Commission. The SmartLM solution decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution. All authorisations are expressed as and guaranteed by Service Level Agreements. We will present the core technology, discuss various security aspects and how they are addressed in SmartLM, and present a number of usage scenarios leveraged by the SmartLM technology. Finally, we will give an outlook on specific issues and current work extending the solution to Clouds and service based systems in general.

Large-scale scientic research often relies on the collaborative use of Grid and e-Science infrastructures that oer a wide variety of Grid resources for scientists. While many production Grid projects and e- Science infrastructures have begun to oer services for the usage of computational resources to end-users during the past several years, the absence of a widely accepted standard for tracing resource usage of Grid users has lead to dieren t technologies among the infrastructures. Recently, the Open Grid Forum developed a set of emerging standard specications, namely the Usage Record Format (URF) and the Re- source Usage Service (RUS) that aim to manage and expose user trac- ings. In this paper, we present the integration of these standards into the UNICORE Grid middleware that lays the foundation for valuable tools in the area of accounting and monitoring. We present the devel- opment of Grid extensions for the LLview application, which allows to monitor the utilization (e.g. usag...

faces provide functionality of major importance. Emerging e-Science and Grid infrastructures such as EGEE and DEISA rely on highly available services that are capable of managing scientific jobs. It is the adoption of emerging open standard interfaces which allows the distribution of Grid resources in such a way that their actual service implementation or Grid technologies are not isolated from each other, especially when these resources are deployed in different e-Science infrastructures that consist of different types of computational resources. This paper motivates the interoperability of these infrastructures and discusses solutions. We describe the adoption of various open standards that recently emerged from the Open Grid Forum (OGF) in the field of job submission and management by well-known Grid technologies, respectively gLite and UNICORE. This has a fundamental impact on the interoperability between these technologies and thus within the next generation e-Science infrastructures that rely on these technologies. Third IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing 0-7695-3064-8/07 $25.00

The UNICORE grid technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed grid resources such as computational or storage related resources. In addition, its extensible character through application-specific plug-ins and its enhancements developed in various European-funded projects leads to the UNICORE technology that is used in daily production at many supercomputer centers and research facilities world-wide today. In this

A recent survey of the 451group on Cloud usage highlights software licensing as one of the top five obstacles for Cloud computing, quite similar to what has been observed in the Grid already a couple of years. The reasons are the same: the current praxis of software licensing, both in terms of business models and licensing technology. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments, especially when the environment stretches across administrative domains like it is the case for public Clouds. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application.