Observatory Sciences is providing EPICS software development effort to the new European Spallation Source being built at Lund in Sweden, working in partnership with Osprey DCS, whose founder Bob Dalesio was one of the original developers of EPICS whilst working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Observatory Sciences has built up a global reputation for its expertise with EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System), which provides an architecture for control system software to be constructed as a scalable, distributed database of control components.

EPICS is well proven and is used at many of the world's most important scientific institutions. Since its beginning as a two-project collaboration in 1989, EPICS has become globally recognised as a capable, robust, and extensible control system infrastructure for a wide range of projects. It is used on hundreds of projects, including accelerators, tokomaks, telescopes and others, in over seventeen countries. Many commercial equipment vendors now advertise EPICS drivers for their technical equipment. For this commitment to constant development Bob Dalesio was presented with a special lifetime achievement award at the ICALEPCS (International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems) in Kobe, Japan in 2009.

The EPICS V3 release series has evolved over more than 20 years and has seen many small evolutionary steps and internal improvements, while in parallel a new layer for structured data and a new network protocol have been developed, named EPICS V4. This year, EPICS V3 and V4 are being merged to form a new major release called EPICS 7. The work being done at ESS will help achieve this aim.

The European Spallation Source (ESS) is a multi-disciplinary, multi-national research facility and will become the home of the world's most powerful pulsed neutron source. It is based in Sweden, but much of the data analysis capability will be located in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The ground breaking neutron source should be completed by 2019 and in regular use by 2023, providing scientists with new opportunities to increase understanding of atomic structures and mechanisms.