UNICORE summit 2011 : proceedings, 7 - 8 July 2011, Torun, Poland

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. The Summit has been held every year since it started in 2005. The 2011 Summit took place in Torun on July 7 and 8. Torun is an ancient city in Northern Poland picturesquely located on the Vistula river. At about the same time when UNICORE was founded the medieval part of Torun was designated a World heritage by the UNESCO. The event was opened with an invited talk by Abdulrahman Azab from the University of Stavanger on the usage of R and UNICORE for medical research. In the following, 16 technical contributions gave more insights to various development and usage aspects. Additionally, posters were presented by the authors in a poster session on Friday. In the second invited talk Piotr Bala from Warsaw reported on the usage of UNICORE in the polish national Grid initiative PL-Grid. A unique feature of the Summit were the lively plenary discussions. The topics focused on the future ways UNICORE should go, with subjects like "UNICORE and Clouds" or "UNICORE and Portals". We would like to thank all contributors for their presentations and papers as well as the organisers of the UNICORE Summit 2011 in Torun for their excellent work. 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/. We are looking forward to the next UNICORE Summit 2012