By Uwe Harms -- Munich, As ZAM (Central Institute of Applied Mathematics) of Research Centre Jülich reported in its April edition of ZAM aktuell, Dr. Makoto Furunishi of MEXT, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture,Sports, Science and Technology, announced during the Global Grid Forum (GGF7) in Tokyo that UNICORE has been selected as the Grid middleware for the new National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI). Dr. Makoto Furunishi of MEXT, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture,Sports, Science and Technology, announced during the Global Grid Forum (GGF7) in Tokyo that UNICORE will become the Grid middleware for the new National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI). It is led by Dr. Kenichi Miura, Fujitsu Laboratories. This initiative plans to build an infrastructure making over a hundred Teraflops available for scientific applications. It will be funded with 10 Billion Yen (100 Million US$) over five years. The idea to develop UNICORE was created very early in 1996 by German Supercomputer Centres initiated, started and they created the grid infrastructure UNICORE (Uniform Interfaces to Computing Resources). ZAM was the project leader it was realised with its partners from research, academia and industry, funded by the BMBF (German Ministry of Research). The UNICORE project, started in 1997. After the successfull end they together with industrial partners they realised the add on project UNICORE Plus. UNICORE is the base of the European Eurogrid. In the meantime the development reached a production stage. Thus the UNICORE Forum decided to announce an „open source" licence of the UNICORE Software for research purposes. UNICORE Using this grid system researchers can start remote jobs from their client everywhere without knowing the job control language as well as the file system and the compiler parameters of the target computer. This can be one of the participating German supercomputers or one of the machines within an institution. In the next step the developers will create portals for specific application packages like computational chemistry and computer aided engineering and simulation. A specific project, GRIP, realises the interoperability of UNICORE and the US-based grid-system Globus, and the compatibility with the new grid standard OGSA. The UNICORE Forum In the beginning of 2000 users and developers founded the UNICORE Forum as an autonomous, open and a non-profit organisation, which pushes and supports the development, distribution and the use of UNICORE. It controls the specifications and the application programming interfaces of the UNICORE system and guarantees the very important independence. In addition, the Forum will provide support in certifying that implementations comply with the latest UNICORE standards. The participation is open for grid developers, grid users, hard- and software vendors and interested partners. Actually it has 25 members, including all the vendors interested and involved in grid technology. Additionally international computer centres in academia and research are members of the forum. UNICORE Forum offers sources of UNICORE software The availability of the first production of UNICORE inspired the Forum in its last session in April. It decided to make the software available for all interested partners for research purposes. The base is an community source licence model. It can be downloaded from Http://www.unicore.org. For production environments Pallas GmbH, Brühl, Germany, offers a commercial UNICORE version. It can be used in industrial environments like Intranet solution or as a technology for the Application Service Provider model. UNICORE Test Site A UNICORE test system is available for people not involved in the project. It includes the current client and a set of target sites to send jobs to. The Central Institute for Applied Mathematics (ZAM) of the Research Centre Jülich installed a dedicated test grid for functionally testing. The installation and initialisation as well as the 30 day usage restriction are described on the web site. The Test Grid simulates there UNICORE Sites with up to two target systems. An access to real supercomputers is not possible. Thus interested users can check the user interface and the functionality even if they are not involved in the project. Some informations about NAREGI can be found in the powerpoint slides of the keynote talk of the 3rd PRAGMA 2003 conference. http://www.apgrid.org/pragma3/slides.html (3rd PRAGMA 2003) http://www.unicore.org (UNICORE Forum) http://www.unicore.de (UNICORE Starting Page) http://www.fz-juelich.de/unicoreplus (BMBF-Projekt: 1.1.2000 - 31.12.2002) http://www.fz-juelich.de/unicore-test (UNICORE Testgrid) http://www.eurogrid.org (Eurogrid-Project) http://www.grid-interoperability.org (GRIP-Project) Uwe Harms Harms Supercomputing Consulting