The Bari ReCaS DataCenter has been built by the University of Bari "Aldo Moro" and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the framework of the  ReCaS project (PON Research and Competitiveness 2007-2013 Notice 254 / Ric ).

It was completed in July 2015 and inaugurated on July 9, 2015 (see poster).

The aim of the ReCaS project was the upgrade of four DataCenter in Southern Italy, namely Catania, Cosenza, Naples and Bari.

In fact in Bari the "Bari Computing Centre for Science (Bc²S)" was in  operation since 2009: this DataCenter was built by INFN to support scientific computing  needs of the ALICE and CMS experiments running at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.

The Bc²S computing farm, before being integrated at the end of 2015 into the ReCaS DataCenter, could count on a computing power of 4000 cores distributed over 250 nodes and about 1700 TB of shared disk space on Lustre file system.

The increase in computing power provided by the ReCaS projet consisted in 128 servers, each with 64 cores and 256GB of RAM, for a total of more than 8000 core and 3500 TB of disk storage.
Typically, an high-energy physics application uses a single core, so that the ReCaS can execute simultaneously more than 8,000 independent applications (12000 taking into account the number of cores already available in Bc²S).

In addition, the Recas Data Center houses a small cluster dedicated to High Performance Computing  (HPC) for running applications that use a large number of cores in parallel  with an intense exchange of messages between cores.

The HPC cluster consists of 20 servers, interconnected by means of a low latency Infiniband network, each with 40 cores, for a total of 800 cores; each server is equipped with a graphics accelerator NVIDIA K40.

The HPC cluster is capable to run applications that use up to 800 cores in parallel, which is adequate for several applications as well as to test algorithms before running them on HPC computers of greater sizes.