The key role of the UNICORE technology in european distributed computing infrastructures supporting e-science applications in the decades to come

Computational simulations and thus scientific computing is the third pillar alongside theory and experiment in science for a few decades now. In the last decade, the term Grid and later e-science evolved as a new research field that both focus on collaboration in key areas of science using so-called next generation distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) to extend the potential of scientific computing. During the past years, significant international and broader interdisciplinary e-research is increasingly carried out by global collaborations that often share the resources of these DCIs. Examples of these DCIs have been the Enabling Grid for e-Science (EGEE) infrastructure as well as the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) in Europe. Despite of the early success we can observe a change in the near future with these infrastructures since these project-based funded infrastructures like EGEE or DEISA move towards a more sustainable funding model in Europe. The result is a different landscape of DCIs as experienced in the last decade leading to the European Grid Initiative (EGI) infrastructure and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) infrastructure. At the same time end-user communities organized themselves better than before and developed roadmaps for their scientific endeavours. In this context, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) released an interesting roadmap of 44 projects that bear the potential of a high amount of end-users that also require DCIs for their scientific e-research. Another promising roadmap alignment of DCI end-users can be observed in the context of the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) to push and focus efforts related to e-Health. In parallel to all the aforementioned 'emerging changes' UNICORE is still established as the technology of choice for resources used in High Performance Computing (HPC). The question remains whether this will be the case in the future and to which extend new e-research endeavours will influence the funding opportunities (and thus major developments) for the UNICORE community. This contribution will give some answers to these questions by providing one potential UNICORE roadmap that reveals a promising future.