UNICORE Summit 2013

When the foundations of UNICORE were laid in the late 90's of the 20th century the "ancestors" intended to create a uniform interface to computing resources for a (small) number of computing centres. Today - in the era of eSciences and large distributed eInfrastructures - UNICORE has become one of the most innovative and major middlewares in Grid Computing serving users around the world. The UNICORE Summit is a unique event for users, developers, researchers, administrators and service providers to meet. They hear the latest news, share their experiences, present recent and intended developments, get new ideas for projects, find partners and discuss the future of UNICORE. Since the first Summit in 2005, the organisers have received and reviewed a significant amount of distinguished contributions. This year, it has been held as a satellite event at the ISC Conference in Leipzig, Germany, on 18 June 2013. About 30 researchers from Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Russia, Belarus, and the United States participated in the conference. The event was opened with the keynote speech "Quo vadis EGI Clouds?" delivered by Michel Drescher, the EGI Technical Manager, who presented the EGI Federated Cloud Infrastructure. His talk was well-received by the attendees and provided a lot of discussions about UNICORE integration into cloud infrastructures. Recent developments in integration of applications from community projects, interoperability use cases, security aspects, virtualization techniques, performance evaluation, experiences from end users and administrators, data management, the UNICORE web portal as well as new ideas and concepts and related topics were highlighted in the various talks and demonstrations. Those selected and presented topics guaranteed lively discussions about the state-of-the art and the future of UNICORE, Grids, and distributed computing in general. The slides to the presentations can be found on the web at http://www.unicore.eu/summit/2013/schedule.php We would like to thank all contributors for their presentations and papers as well as the organisers of the UNICORE Summit 2013 in Leipzig for their excellent work. Our deepest thanks go to the program committee members and external reviwers for their hard work in reviewing papers. We are sure every participant will keep this wonderful event in mind. More information about the UNICORE summit series can be found at http://www.unicore.eu/summit/.