BLISS - Beamline Control Software

BLISS (BeamLine Instrumentation Support Software) is the new ESRF experiment control system that will be used to run the beamlines after the ESRF Extremely Brilliant Source upgrade (ESRF-EBS).

The project started back in December 2015 within the Beamline Control Unit of the ESRF, and BLISS will gradually replace SPEC which has been in place at the ESRF since 1992. The current implementation status, showing which beamlines have moved to BLISS and which are still running SPEC for now, is shown in section 2 below and is regularly updated (see date below the table).

BLISS provides a holistic approach to synchrotron experiments control. The scope of the project goes from hardware control up to the end-user interface. It is built as a modular pile of frameworks, that are orchestrated from one single command-line interface for users to be able to run their own custom scripts.

The BLISS programming language is Python and can therefore be easily embedded into any Python application, paving the way for advanced data management and online data analysis.

More information can be found in the dedicated area of the open source GitLab project.