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.