EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) is a set of Open Source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft, real-time, control systems for scientific instruments.

ITER has selected EPICS as the software environment used to build the ITER control system. In so doing the CODAC (COntrol Data Access and Communication) team made what it described as 'a safe, conservative choice'. "It is free, open-source, software that provides an architecture for building scalable control systems together with a collection of codes and tools. And, since EPICS is being implemented in other large facilities, we can get feedback and help from the EPICS user community on ways to customise it for our particular application," explains Franck Di Maio, CODAC & IT CHD Department, ITER, who organized the four-day EPICS training program for the CODAC team."

Observatory Sciences provides comprehensive consultancy services for EPICS software and associated hardware, as well as training courses. Philip Taylor, Director, Observatory Sciences commented, “The EPICS community is delighted by the ITER decision. EPICS is an established software architecture that is well-proven and reliable, and can be readily tailored to ITER's requirements. Moreover, the CODAC team can be assured of input and feedback from a large community of existing users."