UNICORE: uniform access to supercomputing as an element of electronic commerce

Abstract

The battle for the desktop has been won by workstations and PCs. Offering computational capacity adequate for most applications, and superior user interfaces, they also incorporate the user’s link to a global information base via the World Wide Web. By contrast, High Performance Computing facilities tend to be increasingly isolated by such deterrents as geographical remoteness, architectural individuality, and the non-uniform operational policies of autonomous centres. The future of such centralised Supercomputing facilities and large scale data resources may depend to a large extent on the development of interfaces for accessing their resources from the user’s desktop in a uniform and user-friendly manner; otherwise, High Performance Computing may fall short of its full potential, becoming increasingly specialised and less competitive. In the most pessimistic scenario, the volume of the HPC market could fall below the threshold required for its economic survival in the free marketplace. The Uniform Interface to Computing Resources (UNICORE) project addresses these issues using the mechanisms of the World Wide Web (WWW).