UNICORE

What is UNICORE?

UNICORE (UNiform Interface to COmputing REsources) provides tools and services for building federated systems, making high-performance computing and data resources accessible in a seamless and secure way for a wide variety of applications in intranets and the internet.

Site administrators and resource owners install UNICORE to enable secure distributed and federated applications involving HPC resources, including web-based access and hybrid Cloud/HPC workflows.

End users and application developers use UNICORE's comprehensive set of RESTful APIs for HPC access and workflows, dealing with user authentication, user account mapping and authorization in a highly flexible way.

UNICORE Services and APIs

• Batch jobs with pre- and postprocessing
• Support for common resource managers such as SLURM or LSF
• File system access and file transfer
• Site-to-site file transfer
• Cross-site workflows featuring graphs, loops, conditions, variables, hold/continue, workflow data management
• Direct access to applications running on HPC (e.g. for steering or visualisation)
• Metadata
• Service Registry

Security

• Flexible user authentication: username/password, OpenID Connect, SSH keys, X.509, …
• Flexible mapping of users to local accounts and groups
• Based on open standards: X.509 Public Key Infrastructure, TLS, SAML, OIDC, XACML, …

Clients

• Commandline client: Job execution, data transfer, workflows, scripting, batch mode, extensible
• Dedicated client for UFTP high performance file transfer and data management features
• PyUNICORE Python client library

Add-ons

• Standalone UFTP suite for high-performance data transfer (can be used independently of UNICORE)