| 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>
