History

Early UNICORE...

End of 1998 the concept of "Grid computing" was introduced in the monograph "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure" by I. Foster and C. Kesselman. Two years earlier, in 1997, the development of the UNICORE - Uniform Interface to Computing Resources - system was initiated to enable German supercomputer centers to provide their users with a seamless, secure, and intuitive access to their heterogeneous computing resources.

As in the case of the Globus® Toolkit, UNICORE was started before "Grid computing" became the accepted new paradigm for distributed computing. The UNICORE vision was proposed to the German Ministry for Education and Re- search (BMBF) and received funding. A first prototype was developed in the "UNICORE" project. The foundations for the current production version were laid in the follow- up project "UNICORE Plus", which was successfully completed in 2002.

... and the road towards standards

In recent years, UNICORE has undergone a major restructuring and re-implementation of core components. This has been done in the European UniGrids project. Now, UNICORE is based on Web Services as proposed by the Open Grid Services Architecture maintained by the Open Grid Forum. In fact, UNICORE 6 is currently the most up-to-date implementation of the core specifications (such as WS-RF).