The SICS unit main activity is the optimizing and assisting in the development of CIRA in-house codes.
Among them a prominent place belongs to CFD finite volume codes, whose development began in the '90s using Fortran 77 language. The current codes have inherited the original structure updating and improving the CFD models. Conversely, the software language remained largely unchanged and it has not taken into account, except in small part, on progress in programming languages. This leads to inefficiencies in terms both of computational speed and of memory and disk space management.

In the case of CFD codes CIRA SICS work is divided into the following phases:

• Introduction of shared libraries: it began with the topological part, which describes the the structure of the grid, remained substantially unchanged and shared by the various codes. The library introduces a standard and eliminates the need of recompiling consolidated routines;
• Newest Fortran standard (currently 2008): programs are more compact, less prone to errors and independent of the compiler being used;
• Use of dynamic structures: optimize the amount of memory and the access to data;
• Elimination of common blocks and switching to modules: encapsulation paradigm;
• In parallel MPI, the code has passed from architecture master-slave to cooperative one: each process is able to read and write its own data and there is no need to initially allocate all data in one of them. This enables larger run in symmetrical knots.