Federated computing on the web: The UNICORE portal

As modern science requires modern approaches, vast collaborations comprising federated resources on heterogeneous computing systems rise to meet the current scientific challenges. Due to their size and complexity these computing systems become demanding and could further complicate the scientific process. As a result, scientists are overrun with the necessity of additional technical experience that lies outside their domain. UNICORE is a middleware which serves as an abstraction layer to mask the technical details and ensure an easy and unified access to data and computation over federated infrastructures. The Portal is the newest client in the UNICORE portfolio providing web access to data and computing systems. With the rising demand of having an up-to-date user-friendly graphical interface and access to computational resources and data from any device at any point in time, the Portal meets the contemporary needs of the dynamic world wide web. This paper describes the functionality of the Portal and its advantages over other clients. It also discusses security and authentication methods offered by the Portal and presents use cases and client customisation from our practice. It concludes with ideas about future work and extension points for further simplification for the scientific use.