With recent fast-paced advances in Grid and Web service standards and tools, the UNICORE developer community under the leadership of Forschungszentrum Juelich has developed a major new version of the UNICORE Grid middleware. UNICORE 6 excels in supporting leading open standards, interoperability, and easy extensibility through well-defined interfaces, and it also provides excellent performance and scalability. The proven guiding principles of UNICORE have been preserved: seamless and secure access to resources, ease of use, simple deployment, straightforward support for adding new applications and user-specific services.

UNICORE 6 achieves this through fully embracing service-oriented design principles and using a modern tooling stack. The key characteristics of the new UNICORE 6 system are an integrated, complete Grid software stack, strong security, work flows, openness, extensibility, interoperability, easy installation and configuration, and support for a wide range of operating systems, local resource management systems and batch schedulers.

UNICORE 6 is being jointly developed by an Intel Software and Solutions Group team in Bruehl, Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe in London, the University of Warsaw - ICM, CINECA in Bologna and Forschungszentrum Juelich under an open source BSD licence.

On the technical side, UNICORE 6 complies with the OASIS WSRF 1.2 and OGF JSDL 1.0 standards, provides pluggable file transfer mechanisms with the OGSA ByteIO standard as default and uses XFire as a lean, high-performance SOAP stack in conjunction with the Jetty 6 web server. In the security domain, authentication and authorisation are based on full X.509 certificates, SAML assertions and XACML 1.0 authorisation policies; pluggable extensions for proxy certificates and VO management are provided.

The development versions of UNICORE 6 are already in use in the European projects Chemomentum, OMII-Europe, and A-WARE. Major Grid infrastructures like D-Grid and DEISA are expected to upgrade their UNICORE production installations soon.

Over 10 years ago, the development of UNICORE was initiated in Germany with funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The German HPC centres and industry joined together to develop seamless, secure, and intuitive access to supercomputing resources. Like the new release today, the initial software was implemented primarily in Java, offered a feature-rich and intuitive graphical client, enabled users to run complex multi-site work flow jobs, provided support for many operating systems and batch systems, and used X.509 certificates for authentication, authorisation, and signing of jobs. This software was used by the German HPC centres to establish the first supercomputing Grid infrastructure in Europe. Since then UNICORE has been further improved and extended with additional functionality and features in several European projects.