D2.1 Requirements - Initial

This is the milestone 2 version of the UNICORE Requirements document. The goal of the EU-funded UNICORE project is to develop a common code-base and toolchain that will enable software developers to rapidly create secure, portable, scalable, high-performance solutions starting from existing applications. The key to this is to compile an application into very light-weight virtual machines - known as unikernels - where there is no traditional operating system, only the specific bits of operating system functionality that the application needs. The resulting unikernels can then be deployed and run on standard high-volume servers or cloud computing infrastructure.
The technology developed by the project will be evaluated in a number of trials, spanning several application domains. This document describes the current state of the art in those application domains from the perspective of the project partners whose businesses encompass those domains. It then goes on to describe the specific target scenarios that will be used to evaluate the technology within each application domain, and how the success of each trial will be judged. Together, these descriptions give an early indication of the requirements for the UNICORE common code-base and toolchain.
The milestone 3 version of this document will add: descriptions of use cases for the UNICORE tools; technical requirements for the Unikernel core (the common code-base); technical requirements for the UNICORE toolchain; conclusions.