The Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS Extragalactic survey (SIMES) in the South Ecliptic
  Pole field
  We present the Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS Extragalactic survey (SIMES) in the South
Ecliptic Pole (SEP) field. The large area covered (7.7 deg$^2$), together with
one of the lowest Galactic cirrus emissions in the entire sky and a very
extensive coverage by Spitzer, Herschel, Akari, and GALEX, make the SIMES field
ideal for extragalactic studies. The elongated geometry of the SIMES area
($\approx$4:1), allowing for a significant cosmic variance reduction, further
improves the quality of statistical studies in this field. Here we present the
reduction and photometric measurements of the Spitzer/IRAC data. The survey
reaches a depth of 1.93 and 1.75 $\mu$Jy (1$\sigma$) at 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m,
respectively. We discuss the multiwavelength IRAC--based catalog, completed
with optical, mid-- and far--IR observations. We detect 341,000 sources with
F$_{3.6\mu m} \geq 3\sigma$. Of these, 10% have an associated 24 $\mu$m
counterpart, while 2.7% have an associated SPIRE source. We release the catalog
through the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA). Two scientific
applications of these IRAC data are presented in this paper: first we compute
integral number counts at 3.6 $\mu$m. Second, we use the [3.6]--[4.5] color
index to identify galaxy clusters at z$>$1.3. We select 27 clusters in the full
area, a result consistent with previous studies at similar depth.
