As Dietmar Erwin, project manager Unicore plus project, explained in Bonn, the original goal of the Unicore and Unicore plus projects, was to create a seamless, secure, and intuitive environment for accessing distributed computing resources. When the development started, one called this "seamless computing" or "meta-computing". Today, one calls Unicore a vertical integrated Grid environment.

Unicore supports an intuitive interface for the creation and control of jobs. It can support multi-system and multi-site jobs and has dynamic flow control. Security is implemented through X.509 certificates. Unicore provides support for users to manage their certificates. The system also has support for accessing to remote file stores and archives.

The main Unicore implementation includes all the German HPC centres, and the ECMWF and provides German researchers with seamless access to supercomputers and other high-end facilities at these centres. Because this is a research production environment, all the Unicore components have to work flawlessly and they have to interoperate. That is why Unicore was developed as one integrated environment. The Unicore plaform is provided by all major HPC computer vendors.

Dietmar Erwin said he learned from Unicore that support for a virtual organisation is critical for users and centres. Light-weighted procedures are needed for management including certificate.

Because of the specific development route followed, Unicore is one of the few fully tested integrated Grid environments that is available today. It is under certain conditions, available as open source so everyone can use it. There is also a test site were you can get access to a complete Unicore environment.

In one of the early European Grid projects, EuroGrid, the Unicore software is used as basis for provididing application access to several European supercomputer centres. One of the new European projects, Grip, will work on the interoperability of Globus and Unicore. Another, OpenMolGrid, will provide a unified environment for solving molecular design and engineering tasks. It will be built on top of the Grid infrastructure provided by the EUROGRID.

One of the main problems in Grid computing is the lack of standards. One of the proposals that could make it to become a usable standard is OGSA. The Open Grid Services architecture. Work on OGSA started earlier this year with a proposal to the Global Grid Forum (GGF). The standardisation process should be finished in February 2003. OGSA is an extension to web services. OGSA maintains state, i.e. it remembers users and services and what they have done in the past, and it has some persistency of data. All the major vendors put effort into web services, so any main Grid standard should comply with that to be of interest to vendors.

The main architectural design from Unicore dates back from 1997. Despite that fact, the main features and work flow fit the emerging OGSA architecture remarkably well. In his analysis, Fujitsu's David Snelling, involved in Unicore from the beginning, showed that the main work will consist of encapsulating Unicore components as web services. In some areas there is some misalignement between OGSA and Unicore, for instance one has push and the other pull based notification. Web services approach is somewhat different from the consign/endorsment security scheme used in Unicore. But they do no provide major obstacles according to David Snelling. He showed a three phase detailed road map to make Unicore 100% OGSA compliant.

David Snelling concluded that the Unicore architecture and model do not have to be changed to make it "OGSA". This makes the Made-in-Germany Unicore one of the more interesting Grid platforms that are available today.