Kein Folientitel

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Gesellschaft für Parallele Anwendungen und
Systeme mbH
The UNICORE GRID Project
Karl Solchenbach
Pallas GmbHHermülheimer Straße 10D-50321 Brühl,
Germanyinfo_at_pallas.comhttp//www.pallas.com
Workshop CHEP2000, Padua
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What is UNICORE?

• UNICORE is a project funded by the German
  Ministry of Education and Research (BMFB)to
  develop a prototype for seamless, intuitive, and
  secure access to computing resources.
• Duration 07/1997 - 12/1999

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The Unicore Partners (past)

• German BMBF funded for
• Implementation Pallas and Genias.
• Users German Research Centres and Universities
  (FZ Juelich, RUS, DWD, LRZ, RZU, PC2, ZIB.
• Partners/Founders
• fecit
• ECMWF
• Affiliates
• debis, Inpro
• IBM, NEC, SGI/Cray, Siemens/Fujitsu, Hitachi,
  SUN, HP

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Motivation

• Different architectures
• Different vendors
• Different software
• Different usage models
• Incompatible administration
• Incompatible data management

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Motivation

• Consequences
• Users work with the computer
• they are familiar with
• the have resources
• New systems require
• additional learning
• additional conversions of jobs and data
• high administration overhead

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Motivation

• Consequences
• Expensive resources are used sub-optimally
• Problems are solved inefficiently
• Solvable problems are not solved
• This holds for research and industry

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Goals of UNICORE

• Seamless batch access to computing resources
• Production-ready for existing environments
• Based on existing/emerging technologies
• Access to distributed data
• Interdependent jobs on distributed systems

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Goals of UNICORE

• Seamless access to computing resources
• Intuitive GUI for batch submission
• Same look-and-feel independent of target system
  hide the seams
• Facilitate distribution of work to most suitable
  platform or site
• Provide full information about resources

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Goals of UNICORE

• Production-ready for existing environments
• Map abstract UNICORE specifications to site
  specific functions
• Map UNICORE ids (certificates) to local account
  names (Unix logins)
• Site retains full control over resources
• No changes to local resource management or
  accounting

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Goals of UNICORE

• Based on existing/emerging technologies
• Access via www
• Java and Java applets
• X.509 certificates

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Goals of UNICORE

• Interdependent jobs on distributed systems and
  access to distributed data
• User specifies target system (s)
• UNICORE distributes jobs to sites
• UNICORE synchronizes execution
• UNICORE transfers required data between sites

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Unicore Architecture

• 3 tiers
• User interface Job Preparation Agent, Job
  Management and Control
• Site Security Gateway, authentication
• Job Control Network Job Supervisor

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Unicore Security and Authentication

• Jobs will be submitted to a site over the
  Internet
• needs a trusted Unicore component to authorise
  the jobs on any Firewall, the GATEWAY
• Sites keep autonomy over who is a user
• each Unicore user must have a local login
  (different at each site)
• Gateway maps Unicore user to local incarnation
• HTTPS and X509 certificates
• certificate identifies the Unicore user
• implementation comes as standard with (some)
  servers and browsers

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The Abstract Job Object

• The Abstract Job Object (AJO)
• uniform model of computing actions
• data access as well as computing
• asynchronous
• extensible
• AJO is the link between instantiations of Unicore
  agents (and different implementations)

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UNICORE Environment
Seamful
Seamless
Site A
Site C
User
JPA
NJS
Browser
Site B
NJS
AJO Environment
Transfer
Export
AJO Environment
Site File Store
Site File Store
Import
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What is not in the UNICORE prototype?

• Concurrent use of distributed systems(application
  -level metacomputing)
• Computational steering
• Application specific interfaces
• Resource brokers
• Support for every platform

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Summary

• UNICORE will establish infrastructure for
  supercomputer centers in Germany to share
  resources
• Users want UNICORE now
• UNCORE has vendor support

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Future

• Create a UNICORE product (Pallas)
• Deploy UNICORE at German HPC centers
• UNICORE Plus project is funded by German
  government (01/2000 - 12/2002)
• European GRID initiative EUROGRID

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EUROGRID

• Idea European GRID project supported by leading
  European HPC centers
• Experiment for application-specific GRIDs
  (biology, weather, CAE, )
• Proposal to European Commission
• Partners
• HPC centers CSAR, IDRIS, ICM, FZ Jülich,
  Parallab
• Users MSC, DWD, Aeromatra
• Integration Pallas, Fecit