  The UNICORE Grid-technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access
to distributed Grid resources. In this paper we present the recent evolution
from project results to production Grids. At the beginning UNICORE was
developed as a prototype software in two projects funded by the German research
ministry (BMBF). Over the following years, in various European-funded projects,
UNICORE evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which
today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide.
Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in
many European and International research projects, which use existing UNICORE
components to implement advanced features, high level services, and support for
applications from a growing range of domains. In order to foster these ongoing
developments, UNICORE is available as open source under BSD licence at
SourceForge, where new releases are published on a regular basis. This paper is
a review of the UNICORE achievements so far and gives a glimpse on the UNICORE
roadmap.
