The UNICORE GRID Project Karl Solchenbach Gesellschaft für Parallele Anwendungen und Systeme mbH Pallas GmbH Hermülheimer Straße 10 D Brühl, Germany Workshop CHEP2000, Padua

© Pallas GmbH 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/ /1999 What is UNICORE?

© Pallas GmbH The Unicore Partners (past) German BMBF funded for: –Implementation: Pallas and Genias. –Users: German Research Centres and Universities (FZ Juelich, RUS, DWD, LRZ, RZU, PC 2, ZIB. Partners/Founders –fecit –ECMWF Affiliates –debis, Inpro –IBM, NEC, SGI/Cray, Siemens/Fujitsu, Hitachi, SUN, HP

© Pallas GmbH Different architectures Different vendors Different software Different usage models Incompatible administration Incompatible data management Motivation

© Pallas GmbH 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 Motivation

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

© Pallas GmbH 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 Goals of UNICORE

© Pallas GmbH 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 Goals of UNICORE

© Pallas GmbH 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 Goals of UNICORE

© Pallas GmbH Based on existing/emerging technologies Access via www Java and Java applets X.509 certificates Goals of UNICORE

© Pallas GmbH 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 Goals of UNICORE

© Pallas GmbH Unicore: Architecture 3 tiers –User interface: Job Preparation Agent, Job Management and Control –Site Security: Gateway, authentication –Job Control: Network Job Supervisor

© Pallas GmbH 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

© Pallas GmbH 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)

© Pallas GmbH UNICORE Environment UserJPA Browser Site File Store AJO Environment Site A Site B Site C NJS Seamful Seamless Import Export Transfer

© Pallas GmbH

Concurrent use of distributed systems (application-level metacomputing) Computational steering Application specific interfaces Resource brokers Support for every platform What is not in the UNICORE prototype?

© Pallas GmbH UNICORE will establish infrastructure for supercomputer centers in Germany to share resources Users want UNICORE now UNCORE has vendor support Summary

© Pallas GmbH Create a UNICORE product (Pallas) Deploy UNICORE at German HPC centers UNICORE Plus project is funded by German government (01/ /2002) European GRID initiative EUROGRID Future

© Pallas GmbH 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