High Performance Scientific Computing Using Distributed Infrastructures

This book aims to provide a deep look into Italian actions taken in some fields of science and high performance computing (HPC), and the Italian effort to bridge the HPC gap with respect to Europe. The Italian PON ReCaS Project is written for graduate readers and professionals in the field of high performance computing. It presents and discusses innovative and important technological solutions, and describes interesting results in various fields of application.

ReCaS stands for "Rete di Calcolo per SuperB e altre applicazioni" and is a computing network infrastructure in Southern Italy devoted to scientific and non-scientific applications within the vision of a common European infrastructure for computing, storage and network. The ReCaS project is part of the 2007-2013 European Union strategy, and was funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education (MIUR) for the development and enhancement of a distributed computing infrastructure of the Grid/Cloud type over the four EU 'Convergence' regions in Southern Italy: Campania, Puglia and Sicily and Calabria.

The network will be open and accessible to all researchers, public and private, and will be characterized by unprecedented computing power and storage capacity. Posted in the European Grid Infrastructure EGI, ReCaS is also an opportunity to the countries of the Mediterranean area and extends the potential of the current network.

Leonardo Merola is Professor of Experimental Physics at the Naples University Fredrico II, Italy. His main experience covers data acquisition, computing and software, data analysis in the field of Higgs Boson research, and electroweak precision measurements.

Giuliano Laccetti is presently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Naples Federico II, in Naples, Italy. He has recently been involved in National (EU funded) Projects such as SCOPE, and, presently, RECAS. Prof Laccetti's main research interests are mathematical software, scientific computing, high performance architecture for scientific computing, parallel and distributed computing, grid computing, cloud computing, and algorithms on emerging hybrid architectures.

Giorgio Maggi is Professor in General Physics at Politecnico de Bari, Italy; is associated to the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) research program; and is responsible for the CMS and ALICE Tier2 in Bari, Italy.

Guglielmo De Nardo is Associate Professor in Experimental Physics at the University of Naples Federico II, in Naples, Italy. Co-author of more than 500 scientific publications, Prof. De Nardo has been involved in particle physics research in the Flavour Physics sector.

Guido Russo is Professor at the University of Napoli Federico II, Italy (since 2000, and previously University of Cosenza, Italy. Prof Russo is author of about 150 publications in international journals, across many fields of technology, physics, and information technology.

Enrico Tassi is Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, at Università della Calabria, Italy. A member of the ZEUS experiment at HERA since 1995, and member of the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC since 2002, Prof Tassi has authored/co-authored more than 600 international publications to date. His research activities mainly focuse on experimental Particle Physics, phenomenology of the Standard Model, and cloud and grid computing in High Energy Physics.

Roberto Bellotti is Associate Professor in Experimental Physics and Director of the Medical Physics School at the University of Bari, Italy. He is (co)author of over 200 publications in international journals including Nature, Science, NeuroImage and Medical Physics.

Sabina Tangaro is currently a Researcher of Physics at INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics), Sezione di Bari, Italy. Her responsibilities in experiments and projects focused on activities related to the analysis and understanding of bio-medical images and patterns, machine learning and related applications.