Today, many scientific disciplines heavily rely on computer systems for in-silico experimentation or data management and analysis. The employed computer hard-and software is heterogeneous and complies to different standards, interfaces and protocols for interoperation. Grid middleware systems like UNICORE 6 try to hide some of the complexity of the underlying systems by offering high-level, uniform interfaces for executing computational jobs or storing, moving, and searching through data. Via UNICORE 6 computer resources can be accessed securely with different software clients, e. g. the UNICORE Commandline Client (UCC) or the graphical UNICORE Rich Client (URC) which is based on Eclipse. In this paper, we describe the design and features of the URC, and highlight its role as a flexible and extensible Grid client framework using the QSAR field as an example.
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 servicesbased interfaces. It describes the interface integration ofemerging open standards such as OGSA-BES and OGSA-RUS and thus provides an overview of UNICORE 6.
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