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

The battle for the desktop has been won by workstations and PCs. Offering c omputational capacity adequate for most applications, and superior user int erfaces, 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 remote ness, architectural individuality, and the non-uniform operational policies of autonomous centres. The future of such centralised Supercomputing facil ities and large scale data resources may depend to a large extent on the de velopment of interfaces for accessing their resources from the user's deskt op in a uniform-acid user-friendly manner; otherwise, High Performance Comp uting may fall short of its full potential, becoming increasingly specialis ed and less competitive. In the most pessimistic scenario, the volume of th e HPC market could fall below the threshold required for its economic survi val in the free marketplace. The Uniform Interface to Computing Resources ( UNICORE;) project addresses these issues casing the mechanisms of the World Wide Web (WWW). (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.