The Institute of Applied Computing with Community Code (IAC3) was created by the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) in July 2008, and officially recognized by the Government of the Balearic Islands by March 2015. The focus of the Institute is based on the synergies created by the integration of different research groups, with expertise in Astrophysics, Relativity, and Image Processing. The common ground, beyond the quest for excellence, is the need to develop numerical codes for simulating systems of differential equations.
In some scientific communities, the development of complex numerical codes is used as an advantage regarding competing groups. That requires resources focused on computing techniques, which are taken away from the main research objectives. The IAC3 vision is, in contrast, the cooperation between groups towards the common goal of shared codes. This synergy is seen as a competitive advantage for the community as a whole, which frees resources for their specific fields of research.
The necessary polyvalence of the resulting code opens the door to the application in other contexts, both scientific and technological, ranging from satellite image processing to applications in computational physiology.
Some aspects that further define the Institute’s profile are:
- Research excellence, as shown for instance by its participation (as the only Spanish institution) in the LIGO project on gravitational waves detection.
- Knowledge transfer, as shown by the collaboration with Spanish (Atos, Deimos Space, Telefonica) and French (DxO, Thales) companies in different research projects, or the registration of patents.
The Balearic Islands University has been awarded with the International Excellence Campus mention. The research lines of this national project include one about ‘Physics, Computation and Applications’ in which the IAC3 plays a significant role. We also participate in the teaching of the Advanced Physics and Applied Mathematics Master Degree.
The Institute is organized according to its bylaws and is currently structured along five lines of research: