Objectives

UNICORE has special characteristics that make it unique among Grid middleware systems. The UNICORE design is based on several guiding principles, that serve as key objectives for further enhancements.

Abstraction: UNICORE users need not know details about the system that they use. UNICORE provides abstractions for concepts such as application software and storage locations. Thus, UNICORE allows seamless access to heterogenous environments.

Security: UNICORE offers strong security based on industry standards such as the X.509 PKI. Communication over the internet is protected by mutual authentication.

Site autonomy: when making resources available on the Grid, administrators keep fine-grained control about their resources. Local policies are respected.

Ease of use: A powerful GUI client covers the most common usage scenarios, such as application execution and multi-step, multi-site workflows.

Ease of installation: UNICORE is simple to install, with minimal external dependencies. Quickstart bundles exist that allow to get up-and-running quickly.