eurosys-topic-selection

name	eurosys-topic-selection
description	Use when deciding whether a systems project belongs at EuroSys — the ACM SIGOPS-Europe flagship spanning OS, distributed systems, storage, cloud, virtualization, security, and ML systems — or routes better to SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, ASPLOS, ATC, FAST, or SoCC, and how the April slot and dual deadlines affect that call.

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>