Cosylab and Jožef Stefan Institute Host the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) Collaboration Meeting 2022
Cosylab, the leading provider of software solutions for the world’s most complex, precise and advanced systems, and the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI), Slovenia’s largest scientific research institute, hosted the EPICS Collaboration Meeting in Ljubljana from September 19-23 2022. The hybrid event focused on sharing experiences, advancements and news in the field of EPICS collaboration, with accompanying workshops, training sessions and more than forty expert technical contributions. On this occasion, Cosylab released two EPICS modules developed by its team, which are now available to the entire EPICS community.
The EPICS Collaboration is an association of organisations from all over the globe involved in the design, development and use of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). The latter 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 machines such as particle accelerators, telescopes, experiment beam lines, fusion experiments and other sophisticated scientific and industrial systems which are comprised of many synchronised subsystems and devices.
The EPICS collaboration meetings provide an opportunity for developers and managers from the various scientific facilities and control systems specialist companies to meet, discuss their work and progress, and coordinate plans for further development. The meetings allow EPICS community members to learn what is being done in various teams and organisations and to review specifications for new tools or their enhancements to maximise the usefulness of the open-source framework to the EPICS fellowship as a whole and avoid duplication of effort.
“The opportunity to meet with collaborators in person is essential to form productive working relationships and benefit from the experiences of our peers at other laboratories. We had a very productive meeting where participants were able to make new connections and revitalise long-standing working relationships. Many thanks to Cosylab and the Jožef Stefan Institute for hosting the Meeting,“ commented Karen White, EPICS Council Chairperson and Control Systems Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“It was great to see old and new collaborators face to face again. These dynamics, technical and human, cannot be achieved in virtual meetings. This meeting certainly revitalises and accelerates the EPICS community to the benefit of the worldwide experimental physics laboratories. I would add that the hybrid mode worked perfectly for people who could not travel and added value to the meeting. Great job by the hosts!” stressed Anders Wallander, Head of ITER Controls Division.
In addition to the workshops, which created a platform for the presentation and discussion of specific topics in more depth and with less time pressure, the Collaboration Meeting 2022 featured an extensive scientific program with presentations ranging from project status reports and EPICS 7 applications to core developments and experiment control.
On the occasion of the EPICS Collaboration meeting, Cosylab released two EPICS modules developed by its team and proven in various complex projects. They are now available to the entire EPICS community at https://epics.cosylab.com.
“I think attendees of this year’s EPICS Collaboration Meeting agree that the event was a complete success – not only for the quantity and quality of technical contributions but also because of the dynamic face-to-face dialogue with lots of interesting questions that the EPICS community has been missing after a three-year dry spell!” underlined Rok Sabjan, Deputy Chief Operations Officer at Cosylab and Chair of the 2022 EPICS Collaboration Meeting. “The Cosylab team was delighted to share two new EPICS modules with all attendees in the spirit of the EPICS open-source community.”