UNICORE provides a seamless interface for preparing jobs that are transparently submitted to remote computing resources. The system hides any seamfull details like accounts and batch systems on the target systems. The UNICORE components are:
the Client (user interface)
the Gateway
the Network Job Supervisor (NJS) and its related components:
the UNICORE User Database (UUDB)
the Target System Interface (TSI)
The complete UNICORE system cannot be covered in all detail in this document. The documentation at hand describes the UNICORE client which is the user interface for submitting and querying UNICORE jobs. For more information on the other parts please refer to their respective documentation.
A UNICORE user is designated by a unique certificate issued by a UNICORE Certificate Authority. Security is enforced by signing each request with this certificate and using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection for transmission to the gateway.
Each job is coded in a special serialized Java object (Abstract Job Object, AJO) and transmitted to the UNICORE Gateway, a component preferably running on the computing center`s firewall. The Gateway checks the attached certificate and forwards the request to the Network Job Supervisor (NJS) running inside the computing center. After checking the UNICORE User Database (UUDB) for a mapping of the certificate to a valid login on the computing resource, the NJS translates the AJO into the machine specific incarnation of the job. The resulting requests are transmitted to the Target System Interface (TSI) which executes them on the selected computing resource.