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 such as a particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific experiments.
These collaboration meetings provide a chance for developers and managers from the various different sites to come together and discuss their work and progress, and make plans for the future. They give a chance to see what is being done at other laboratories, and to review the specifications for new tools or enhancements to existing ones in order to maximize their usefulness to the whole community and avoid duplication of effort.
