UNICORE 7 — Middleware services for distributed and federated computing

Abstract

UNICORE is a mature middleware solution for building federated computing and data infrastructures (i.e. Grids), providing access to high-performance computing (HPC), clusters, file systems and other resources. This paper presents the state of the art in UNICORE, focusing on several major improvements that have been implemented for version 7 released in 2015. We have added RESTful APIs to UNICORE, allowing to easily create applications integrating the full range of UNICORE enabled data and compute resources. New features for data processing and analysis have been added. A new web portal allows simple web access. We have simplified the end-user experience by removing the requirement for X.509 certificates, establishing certificate-less authentication and trust delegation mechanisms. A new component, Unity, for identity management is presented, which enables a wide range of integration scenarios including SAML federations and OpenID connect.