UNICORE

UNICORE (Uniform Interface to Computing Resources) provides tools and services for building federated systems, making high-performance computing and data resources accessible in a seamless and secure way for a wide variety of applications in intranets and the internet.

Features

This page is for users of the Forschungszentrum Jülich supercomputers who want to use UNICORE (UNiform Interface to COmputing REsources) to access the supercomputer resources.

• UNICORE allows you to run jobs, access and transfer data and run workflows on HPC systems in Jülich (and possibly in other HPC centres as well), and to integrate these functionalities into your applications.
• UNICORE primarily offers RESTful APIs that can be used from programming languages such as Python and environments such as Jupyter Notebooks running on Jupyter-JSC.
• A full-featured command line client (UCC) is available that you can download and install on your local workstation. UCC is a Java application and requires a Java runtime environment.

The prerequisite for using UNICORE is that you have an account at JSC for at least one of the HPC systems. The authentication can be done with your webservice (JUDOOR) account, or one of the other accepted authentication methods, such as OAuth tokens from the EBRAINS Project.

Downloads

• UCC is available from Github. You will find the latest version at the top of the list. The installation and configuration is described in the UNICORE UCC documentation.

• For directly using the RESTful APIs we provide a helper library PyUNICORE that can be installed from PyPI with
  "pip install -U pyunicore"

UNICORE at JSC

At JSC, UNICORE serves various purposes. For one, users can use it directly to run computational jobs or orchestrate sets of jobs. Moreover, UNICORE facilitates the running of users' JuypterLabs on our HPC systems.

Additionally, we participate in several federations, where UNICORE is used as the means of access at participating sites. The following information can be used to setup UNICORE clients for use at JSC:

• You can use your JUDOOR username/password to authenticate. In the UCC preferences file, set
  authenticationMethod=USERNAME
  username=<your judoor username>
• Define a truststore containing at least the dfn-verein global_certificate_signer_chain and the GEANT CA certificates
  (otherwise, UCC will ask for confirmation when accessing services)
• The registry address containing links to the Jülich HPC systems is
  https://fzj-unic.fz-juelich.de/FZJ/rest/registries/default_registry

Support

For support regarding UNICORE at JSC, please contact ds-support@fz-juelich.de.