Design and Development of a Replacement for GPE in the UNICORE Rich Client

UNICORE is a collection of server and client software that offers easy and uniform access to various computing resources like HPC systems. Since there are different job scheduling systems, with different job properties, UNICORE needs an abstract job model.Part of the UNICORE Software is the UNICORE Rich Client. This is an eclipse-based graphical client, that offers views for the grid of known UNICORE servers, as well as editors for jobs and workflows. At the moment, the Rich client uses the Grid Programming Environment (GPE) for multiple client tasks. GPE as a whole is meant to help with the development of \textit{Grid-Applications}, both on the server and client side. UNICORE uses parts of the client-side features of GPE to provide a model for job submission and editors for jobs, as well as client representations of the various UNICORE servers.The problem is, that GPE is out-dated, over-engineered and its documentation is not very comprehensive. Because of this, code maintenance is more difficult than it should be.This thesis aims to offer an alternative to GPE for UNICORE. This means a suitable job model, an implementation of the required operations, such as job submission, as well as the relevant GUI elements.To make the job model as extensible as possible and to allow easy maintenance in the future, the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) is used.The EMF model can then be used with the tool EMF Forms to automatically generate GUI elements for editing a job.In this thesis the existing code of the Rich Client will be analysed in respect to it's dependency on GPE, the relevant parts of GPE will be analysed for their function and demands for a GPE replacement will be formulated. After that, the first steps towards an implementation will be described