SUMMARYThis paper gives an overview of the goals, functions, architecture and future development of UNICORE. Its primary goal is to give researchers a seamless access to distributed resources that are available at remote sites. A graphical interface aids users to formulate jobs which are to be performed in a system and site independent fashion. This procedure allows switching between systems without having to change the job. Complex jobs with individual applications running on different systems at different sites may be formulated. UNICORE will perform synchronization and data transfers as required without any user intervention. UNICORE uses X.509 certificates to authenticate users, software and systems and provide secure communication over the internet.
This paper presents a data-intensive architecture that demonstrates the ability to support applications from a wide range of application domains, and support the different types of users involved in defining, designing and executing data-intensive processing tasks. The prototype architecture is introduced, and the pivotal role of DISPEL as a canonical language is explained. The architecture promotes the exploration and exploitation of distributed and heterogeneous data and spans the complete knowledge discovery process, from data preparation, to analysis, to evaluation and reiteration. The architecture evaluation included large-scale applications from astronomy, cosmology, hydrology, functional genetics, imaging processing and seismology.
In recent years, the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS) emerged within Grid infrastructures providing dynamic, fine-grained, access control needed to enable resource sharing across Virtual Organization (VOs). VOMS allows to manage authorization information in a VO scope to enforce agreements established between VOs and resource owners. VOMS is used for authorization in the EGEE and OSG infrastructures and is a core component of the respective middleware stacks gLite and VDT. While a module for supporting VOMS is also available as part of the authorization service of the Globus Toolkit, there is currently no support for VO-level authorization within the new Web services-based UNICORE 6. This paper describes the evolution of VOMS towards an open standard compliant service based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), which in turn provides mechanisms to fill the VO-level authorization service gap within Web service-based UNICORE Grids. In addition, the SAML-based VOMS allows for cross middleware VO management through open standards.
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