Experiences with Using UNICORE in Production Grid Infrastructures DEISA and D-Grid

The early stages of Grid Computing focussed on developing concepts and prototype software. Grid middleware is now at a phase of some maturity and today the focus has shifted to providing production ready Grid environments for scientists. DEISA and D-Grid aim for this production scope. DEISA is the consortium of leading national European supercomputing centres that currently deploys and operates a persistent, production quality, and distributed supercomputing environment in Europe. D-Grid is the German Grid initiative that builds up and operates a sustainable Grid infrastructure and establishes methods of e-science in the German scientific community. UNICORE is used in DEISA and D-Grid as the interface to heterogeneous production resources, and hides the complexity of resources from users. UNICORE is one of the leading Grid middleware systems used in production Grid infrastructures worldwide. This paper describes the experiences with UNICORE as Grid middleware in e-infrastructures comprising production systems in production use.