eurosys-topic-selection

EuroSys Topic Selection

Use this before serious writing begins. EuroSys is the flagship conference of

the European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS (eurosys.org, rendered 2026-07-08),

running annually since 2006 and seeking papers on **all areas of computer

systems** — it is a broad-church systems venue, not a niche. The 2026 edition

(the 21st) met in Edinburgh in April; 2027 meets in Rabat. The right question

is rarely "is this systems?" but "is this conference-grade systems, and is

EuroSys the best-positioned jury and calendar slot for it?"

The substance bar

A EuroSys-ready project typically has all four:

• A built thing. An implemented system or substantial modification, not a

simulation of one (measurement and experience papers are the exception, and

must be framed as such).

• A transferable idea. An abstraction, mechanism, or empirically

established principle that outlives this codebase.

• Evidence under realistic conditions. Workloads and scale that resemble

the deployment story being told.

• An articulable insight. One sentence a reviewer can carry into the PC

meeting. Strong engineering without a nameable idea routes to ATC-style

venues or an experience track.

Routing from the EuroSys seat

| Center of gravity | Stay or route | Why |

|---|---|---|

| OS/kernel, runtimes, virtualization, distributed infra | EuroSys core | The venue's home ground since 2006 |

| ML systems (serving, training infra) | EuroSys core, growing | Recent best papers are LLM-serving systems (e.g., EuroSys '25) |

| Once-a-generation OS-principles result | Consider SOSP/OSDI too | Same-family flagships; route by cycle timing and audience |

| Network protocols, measurement of networks | NSDI / SIGCOMM | EuroSys reads it as out-of-center networking |

| Hardware/software interface, arch mechanisms | ASPLOS | Architecture jury evaluates architecture ideas |

| Storage-stack internals | FAST first | Deepest storage jury; EuroSys viable for broader claims |

| Cloud-native ops, serverless economics | SoCC / Middleware also viable | Match the paper's altitude to the jury |

| Pragmatic engineering, tool papers | USENIX ATC | Idea-density bar differs there |

Two calendar facts sharpen the call: EuroSys's April conference and dual gates

(May and September submissions for 2027) interleave with the SOSP/OSDI and

NSDI cycles, so a systems result can almost always find a flagship gate within

a few months — pick by fit and readiness, never by whichever deadline is

nearest. And a EuroSys rejection blocks the same round for a year, which makes

premature submission genuinely expensive.

Fit self-interrogation

1. Insight test: state the idea in one sentence without naming your system.
2. Jury test: which three published papers would this one sit between?
   If ≥2 are EuroSys/SOSP/OSDI papers, EuroSys is plausible.
3. Evidence test: does the current evaluation reach the four-layer stack
   (end-to-end / decomposition / cost / boundary)? If not, is it reachable
   by the target gate?
4. Regime test: is the claim's deployment story credible to reviewers who
   run real infrastructure?
5. Calendar test: which gate (spring/fall) matches the project's maturity,
   accounting for the one-year ban if it fails?

Contribution shapes EuroSys publishes

The exemplars library (resources/exemplars/library.md) documents these

shapes across two decades of the venue's own award line:

| Shape | Award-line instance | What it must bring |

|---|---|---|

| General abstraction + engine | Dryad (2007) | Proof the abstraction subsumes existing practice |

| Tool with a thesis | Coccinelle line (2008) | Validation on the real ecosystem it targets |

| Small mechanism, big evidence | Delay Scheduling (2010) | Production-shaped workloads carrying a simple idea |

| Design-space taxonomy | Omega (2013) | Vocabulary plus trace-driven comparison |

| Production retrospective | Borg (2015) | Transferable lessons including failures |

| ML-infrastructure mechanism | CacheBlend (2025) | A systems idea legible without ML expertise |

If the project matches none of these shapes, that is not disqualifying —

but it should prompt a harder look at what the contribution type is

before a EuroSys jury is chosen for it.

Signals you are forcing it

• The contribution sentence contains "we combine" and three technique names

but no invariant or tradeoff.

• The evaluation exists only at benchmark scale while the pitch is production

scale.

• The nearest related work is entirely from another community's venues — the

jury you are choosing has no vocabulary for the delta.

• The plan is "submit to fall EuroSys because SOSP just closed" — deadline

proximity masquerading as venue fit.

When EuroSys is the strategically right flagship

Beyond raw fit, three situations tilt toward EuroSys among the systems

flagships:

• The work speaks to infrastructure and communities strongly represented

on European PCs (e.g., European cloud/telecom operators, EU data-locality

constraints) and benefits from that jury's context.

• The project's maturity curve matches a EuroSys gate now, and waiting for

another flagship's next cycle risks being scooped by a fast-moving line

of work.

• The team wants the artifact culture: sysartifacts badges plus a named

artifact award make EuroSys a strong home for systems whose artifact is

part of the contribution.

Output format

[Verdict] EuroSys-ready / EuroSys-plausible after gaps / route elsewhere
[Insight sentence] <the transferable idea, system name omitted>
[Neighbor triangulation] <three papers this would sit between>
[Best-fit gate] spring / fall 2027+ with readiness rationale
[If routing away] <venue + the specific mismatch driving it>