The Institute of Applied Computing with Community Code (IAC3) was created by the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) in July 2008. The focus of the Institute is based on the synergies created by the integration of its three 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 partial 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 or applied math, which are taken away from the main research objectives. The vision of IAC3 is, in contrast, the cooperation between groups towards the common goal of shared codes. This 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 (as for instance in the development of wind generators or the tokamak fusion reactor) 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, with results appearing in Nature (2009)


• Knowledge transfer, as shown by the collaboration with Spanish (Atos Origin, Deimos Space, Grid Systems) and French (DxO, Thales) companies in different research projects, or the registration of patents.