VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey" (VIPERS) is an ongoing ESO Large Program to map in detail the spatial distribution of normal galaxies over an unprecedented volume of the z~1 Universe. VIPERS is using VIMOS at the VLT to measure 100,000 redshifts for galaxies with red magnitude I(AB) brighter than 22.5 over an area of 24 square degrees. At this redshift, VIPERS fills a unique niche in galaxy surveys, optimizing the combination of 5-band accurate photometry from the CFHTLS with the multiplexing capability of VIMOS. A robust color-color pre-selection allows the survey to focus its measurements on the 0.5 <= z <= 1.2 redshift range, yielding an optimal combination of large volume (5 x 107 h-3 Mpc3) and high effective spectroscopic sampling (> 40%). With these figures, the VIPERS data set represents the z~1 equivalent of state-of-the-art "local" (z<=0.2) surveys.
VIPERS scientific investigations focus on measurements of large-scale structure and cosmological parameters at an epoch when the Universe was about half its current age. At the same time, the survey can explore the ensemble properties of luminous galaxies, groups and clusters with unprecedented statistical accuracy at these redshifts.