Partners & their Roles

Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH (FZJ)

Role: FZJ will co-ordinate UniGrids. It will contribute to the server side design and development of Unicore/GS, work on steering services, lead the workpackage on Standards and work on WSRF within OASIS.

Consorzio Interuniversitario per il Calcolo Automatico dell'Italia Nord Orientale (CINECA)

Role: CINECA will lead the Application Work Package (WP5), develop software and services for the foundation layer and design, develop and integrate higher level services.

Fujitsu Laboratory of Europe (FLE)

Role: FLE's contributions to the project will be based on its experience in developing Unicore and its position in the standards bodies. FLE leads Work Package 1 and will be a major developer of the technology of that Work Package. FLE will contribute to the design in other Work Packages as well as performing some development of technology. FLEs's other major role will be its contribution to the project's standards activities. FLE will also contribute towards the Dissemination and Collaboration Work Packages.

Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling Warsaw University (ICM)

Role: ICM is responsible for the development of the High Level Services (WP4). They will develop required tools and services based on the existing infrastructure. The development of UNICORE based technology will be adopted and used. ICM will strongly collaborate with the partners, providing them with requirements and ideas for UNICORE development and will act as a tester for the basic functionality developed by the other partners.
Within WP3, ICM will develop tools for integration of visual molecular modelling systems with the Grid infrastructure. The external biomolecular and bioinformatics programs will be integrated with the UNICORE Grid submission system. ICM will use these applications to test and demonstrate functionality developed within the project.

Intel GmbH (Intel)

Role: Intel's contributions to the project will be based on its role in the design and development of Unicore. Intel leads Work Package 2 and will contribute significantly to package and to Work Package 1 regarding design, implementation and tests. Intel will leverage its role in standards bodies to assist the project's standards activities, and contribute to the Dissemination Work package. Being a partner in two other FP6 proposals, Intel will foster collaboration and actively engage in the exchange and reuse of results.

SuperComputing, Visualisation and e-Science, The University of Manchester (UoM)

Role: The University of Manchester's principal role will be to develop the middleware for resource brokering in an economic context and to develop and apply a dissemination strategy. It will supply expertise in Grid middleware, semantic grid technology and experience in running Production Grids in the UK and in previous European projects. The University is a key participant in the UK e-Science programme and under this programme is developing middleware for complex applications and for a Market in Computational Services. The University runs a number of high-profile computing services and is well placed to disseminate the results of the project.

 

T-Systems-SfR (TS-SfR)

Role: As service organisation, T-Systems SfR will take over the role of an integrator and in the exploitation of results. TS-SfR will integrate the project results in the earliest possible stage into pilot and production environments of its customers. TS-SfR will create services around the results of the project and actively market those services in industrial and public R&D markets.

 

UNICORE has been designed and implemented as a total solution for end-users that need to execute their applications on a variety of systems in different organizations and access distributed data. Consequently, UNICORE is a viable production quality Grid middleware with the following unique features that go well beyond any toolkit approach:

• Applications can be used unchanged on different architectures; this is especially important for commercial codes for which source is not available in general.
• Advanced graphical interfaces can be easily integrated for any application.
• Complex workflows involving different systems and different organizations can be easily constructed. The user no longer needs to manage data transfers or start successor jobs manually; this is all done by UNICORE.
• UNICORE's strong end-to-end security ensures authentication of users and accountability of resource consumption.
• UNICORE respects the administrative autonomy of participating organisations.
• UNICORE can utilize resources managed by Globus Version 2 and 3.

The objective of UniGrids is to retain these outstanding characteristics of UNICORE and enhance them so that individual components can interoperate with other web or grid services. Examples are: enlisting a different OGSA compliant resource broker or invoking a Web Service directly from the client without the full stack of UNICORE software.
As a result, Unicore/GS will be more than 'just another OGSA compliant Grid middleware'. It will bring immediate value to the end-user and also to providers of services.

 

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