About UNICORE

UNICORE is unique among federation middleware systems. The UNICORE design is based on several guiding principles, that serve as key objectives for further enhancements.

  • Open source under BSD license.
  • Open and extensible realized with a modern Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows to easily replace particular components with others and to easily add features.
  • Seamless, secure, and intuitive following a vertical, end-to-end approach and offering components at all levels of a modern federated architecture from intuitive user interfaces down to the resource level. UNICORE seamlessly integrates into existing environments.
  • Mature security mechanisms adequate for the use in supercomputing environments and distributed research infrastructures. HTTPS, X.509 certificates, SAML and XACML form the basis for authentication and authorisation, with many options such as OpenID Connect token based authentication, PAM integration and more.
  • Workflow support tightly integrated into the stack.
  • Application integration mechanisms on the client, services and resource level for a tight integration of various types of applications from the scientific and industrial domain.
  • RESTful APIs for excellent performance and easy integration into clients serving various scientific communities, e.g. graphical clients, command line tools and web-based applications.
  • Quick and simple to install and configure to address requirements from operational teams and to lower the barrier of adopting federation technologies. Similarly the configuration of the various services and components is easy to handle.
  • Various operating and batch systems are supported on all layers, i.e. clients, services and systems; Linux, Unix, MacOS, and Windows systems as well as different batch systems are supported such as SLURM, Torque, LSF, etc.
  • Implemented in Java and Python for platform independence, ease of maintenance, excellent performance and reliability.

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