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>